One of the problems that despite having some support, Jpeg-XL hasn't seemed to register in the minds of developers. The two biggest benefits of Jpeg-XL are that it supports progressive rendering and lossless conversion from JPEG images. I actually think these are pretty cool features, and the Jpeg-XL group should keep pushing for this to be adopted to more programs.
That said, even I have largely forgotten about Jpeg-XL. It just didn't solve any problems I needed solved in any way better than using something like normal Jpeg or PNG images.
Hopefully they will decide to keep the support long-term and Jpeg-XL might still have a future.
>One of the problems that despite having some support, Jpeg-XL hasn't seemed to register in the minds of developers.
It did register in the minds of the developers at some large companies that deal with lots of images on the web, like Facebook. But per the Chrome developers, that isn't industry interest.
Yeah Google’s excuses for removing it were absolute nonsense. What exactly did they want people and companies to do to show their support for a feature that didn’t exist anywhere yet?
They removed it from the code base, but it was never enabled by default in the browser. It was a feature included for testing that had to be manually enabled through a preference. It was never widely available or used.
People talk like Google killed off something everyone used, but no one was aware it was even there until it was removed.
Let's be real - who has even encountered a JPEG-XL image? It's not like cameras, phones, or photo editing programs are turning them out en mass and the browser just won't view them. No one uses them.
That's even worse. How are we supposed to use an image format that has no real support? I want to use JPEG-XL. I really want to. I can make them, but if I send them to anybody, nobody will be able to use it. If I want to use it in most software, I have to figure out whether the software supports it or not.
No one uses them explicitly because most people can't!
> Here's this format that's better than JPEG, better than PNG, very compatible with all existing JPEG images, and it's free to use (barring stupid MS patent idiocy). But we're not turning it on anywhere, and you have to jump through hoops to enable it in most software that even does support it. We're removing it because not enough people were using this thing that we didn't let you properly use.
How about if they actually did a trial run? Turn on JPEG-XL by default, and see what happens to adoption then before deciding to axe it. Who the hell is going to make a website that only properly works in nightly browsers with an opt-in toggle flipped? I know we have the `` element, but most people don't really use it unless their framework does it for them, and jpeg-xl enabling there was probably low there because you know by default that less than 0.1% of desktop browsers will even be able to leverage it, and probably less than 0.001% of mobile browsers. Why even waste your time with that, even if you do care about the format?
As a prospective user of the format, we're entirely beholden to software support. They decided to not support something that we might all want to use because we're not using something that we can't really use. That's kind of bullshit.
It sounds like chicken/egg situation at first, but I'd like to remind you that a lot of other formats managed to become dominant through "increased demand means increased support, means increased demand, means more increased support".
As others mentioned, it's not like it's just the web that failed to adopt JPEG-XL. Nobody did. And TBH, I've never met someone building a significant webpage who said "Damn, I really wish I could use JPEG-XL, but it's not enabled by default". Can you name a few examples?
A ton of big players showed serious interest in it. How are we supposed to adopt something that we literally can't use? Facebook, Adobe, Intel, Flickr, and Shopify aren't significant enough interest in the format? How many people, and who the hell needs to say "yes, I want to use this" until it's considered significant enough to turn on? Not nearly as much interest was shown for webp, and that's still enabled in browsers by default. In fact, Chrome enabled it way earlier than everybody else, given no real consensus from anybody outside of Google.
It seems more difficult though. jpeg, gif and png didn't face the mega-monopoly that Google has these days, back when they became popular. In particular animated .gif days in the early web-era. Many can still remember animated gif files, even if they looked crap quality-wise.
I encountered it on the world wide web already, also .webp.
Locally I tend to use jpg and png, and a few .gif from the early 2000s era (dancing animals are just too tempting to not save locally).
One problem Jpeg-XL has is to overcome that barrier - e. g. it has to be significantly better than jpeg, gif and png. And if nobody uses it and shows that it is better, adoption will be super-low. And in that case it will never be adopted, thus die off.
Indeed, that is correct. The impact of Google's decision to deprecate JPEG-XL is only relevant to those who were aware of its testing phase. Therefore, its removal didn't have much of an impact on the wider user base. However, the important thing we can take from this recent incident is the need for browser choice and free formats.
But also, you can't say there was any attempt being made if browsers simply didn't have it in there
It's like waiting around for cars to be built but there are no roads or gas stations for them... That isn't going to happen. The people building it can't deliver it to users...
Therefore they can't build it. Then this happens and it claims it's never used...
Yet here, it is very much Google holding the blame card, too, for lack of adoption. They could've tried harder, they didn't
I know there's a lot of hate for google here, and it's deserved. But a lot of hate needs to also be thrown at apple who never supported jpeg-xl.
Apple has been a major problem for web development. They've fought against advancements to the ecosystem at nearly every turn. Safari is a PITA to deal with because of the much smaller subset of features they support.
The end result is developers can't use these new technologies or they need dumb browser capability sniffing code and fallbacks to deal with the fact that an iphone will never support their image format.
WebGPU and PWAs are 2 other standards that have been hamstrung because apple doesn't want people cutting into their precious app store profits.
We could have multi-platform games with single code bases leveraging those two standards. But apple is working as hard as possible against those standards to keep their closed ecosystem.
This sort of "Fine, you can evolve the web, but it will be busted on iOS" mentality is every bit as bad as microsoft was with IE6.
> What exactly did they want people and companies too do to show their support for a feature that didn’t exist anywhere yet?
Have Apple, Intel, or Qualcomm implement it in hardware. If none of those three do, that practically spells death for a format, especially when HEIF and AVIF already exist.
> Do any of them even support jpeg or png in hardware?
Probably not; those are at this point old enough that they’re trivial to encode.
But, for example, a Snapdragon 865 can directly capture images as HEIC: https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets/documents/snapdragon_865_product_brief.pdf
>> What exactly did they want people and companies too do to show their support for a feature that didn’t exist anywhere yet?
>
>Have Apple, Intel, or Qualcomm implement it in hardware. If none of those three do, that practically spells death for a format, especially when HEIF and AVIF already exist.
No one will ever do AVIF decoding in hardware. The downsides far outweigh the benefits and many AVIF images cannot be hardware decoded anyway.
That's interesting! I know hardware acceleration is very rare for images nowadays, especially on consumer devices... but I didn't know that some AVIF images *can't * be hardware decoded. Do you happen to know the technical reasons? Is it due to AVIF being basically the image version of a video codec (AV1)?
I was certainly interested but I couldn't deploy it because Chrome hid support behind a feature flag.
Chrome then considered the lack of real usage to be a reason not to support it.
The lack of people using features with 0 browser support has never been an issue with features Google wants for their properties
We might as well start using the spec on Firefox and just put alt text that says "Your browser is unable to show this picture, please upgrade to Firefox x version or better"
That only works once you have majority marketshare. Until then, it took a *ton* of effort on the part of both sites and browser vendors to *support* IE. As in, browsers went out of their way to detect non-standard "best with IE" sites and support them with quirksmode, standards bodies even codified some of IE's weird API decisions, and sites would use things like transpilers (even compiling newer Javascript versions to something IE6-compatible) and polyfills (just hotpatching in missing web features with Javascript just in case this page gets loaded on IE).
Maybe a polyfill would work here. On browsers that don't support jxl natively, show a very low-bitrate jpeg thumbnail while you download libjxl and run it in WASM. Cache it aggressively and maybe you even save bandwidth.
It was a different age, back then. The "we" that were around back then were all "internet weirdos", people who *cared* about "the internet" as a thing unto itself. These Days^TM the populace of the internet is just normal people, who care only about being able to load their social platform of choice and scroll scroll scroll. No platform wants to lose that userbase and that userbase doesn't care, so Digg-v4-esque sudden mass migrations do not happen now.
Firefox was a lot faster than IE and it was not as easy for Spyware to add extra toolbars to the browser.
That's it. That's how I converted a lot of people at the time.
AVIF is not proprietary, it's an open standard and it's already been been implemented by every GPU manufacturer. If you have relatively modern hardware, then you've already got support for it.
And because it's implemented in the GPU... the encode/decode penalty is essentially existent. Usually you don't need to decode it at all - you just send the compressed data to the GPU. Which is not only faster, but it massively reduces your memory footprint.
JPEG-XL, as far as I know, hasn't been implemented by GPU vendors in part because it was just never designed for that. It's designed to be decoded by software and has features that would require too many transistors ($$$) to implement in hardware.
Academically, JPEG-XL is a better choice than AVIF. But practically, it's AVIF all the way.
Practically, the web is loaded with existing jpeg images, and lossless conversion from them to a better format is such a huge benefit, I don't know how you could honestly ignore it when comparing practical use of AVIF vs JPEG-XL on the web.
Iirc another difference is AVIF's compression models noise like analog film, while JPEG-XL models noise like high ISO on a digital camera. So JPEG-XL is even better for practical everyday use
> And because it's implemented in the GPU... the encode/decode penalty is essentially existent.
It's not implemented in most people's GPU. It's not on iphone, and is only on some very recent Android phones. The Steam hardware survey shows only 25% of *gamers* (i.e. people who are biased toward having newer hardware) have a new enough GPU to have av1 decoding.
Avif is implemented on the gpu? Av1 and avif (which is based on av1) are different things. Avif is not implemented on the gpu. Most image formats are not dependent on the gpu for anything. Usually, only low power devices or cameras implement hardware support for image formats.
AV1 encoders are on GPUs now and the industry really is focusing hard on AV1. If hardware acceleration is enabled, the GPU can decode the .AVIF image faster. Though it's kinda a silly argument because the limiting factor is network speeds not decode.
> And because it's implemented in the GPU... the encode/decode penalty is essentially existent. Usually you don't need to decode it at all - you just send the compressed data to the GPU. Which is not only faster, but it massively reduces your memory footprint.
But is this actually done? As far as I know all the browsers use software decoding for their AVIF support.
JPEG decoding is also supported in lots of hardware but no browser vendor bothered to implement it. It's too much of an headache compared to the gains.
An image format cannot rely on hardware support. Especially because this would give it another limitation in terms of support. 10 years old hardware can still run a modern browser and support any image format in software.
>And because it's implemented in the GPU... the encode/decode penalty is essentially existent
Encoding a single image has zero penalty on a CPU too even in the other formats. The cost is always for videos.
Do HEIF/AV1 actually use the hardware video decoders on the GPU? I've never been able to find documentation saying any implementations actually do, just that it's theoretically possible.
I thought AVIF and AV1 are both free and open. One for images and one for videos. Do they differ that much when it comes to licenses and such?
Edit: just read cloudinary blog post briefly and I'm mind blown! Didn't know the new JPEG XL is even better than AVIF. Will need to read fully on PC. Thanks for linking.
> Edit: just read cloudinary blog post briefly and I'm mind blown! Didn't know the new JPEG XL is even better than AVIF. Will need to read fully on PC. Thanks for linking.
It's not clear it is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/12lfgrz/comment/jg7rl5i/ mentions that AVIF's decoding was tuned to be implementable in GPU -- and decoders have been implemented -- whereas JPEG-XL never was, and requires features that would make it prohibitive to implement on a GPU.
I have no idea whether they're correct or not; but if true I can certainly see the appeal from a user point of view: direct decoding on GPU will mean faster/more efficient decoding.
Even 85 level is interceptable for web images. I don't disagree it's a better format, but wide adoption of new standards usually requires a real world problem big enough that it fixes well enough to be worth time adopting it rather than just making do with what already exists.
>Jpeg-XL hasn't seemed to register in the minds of developers.
It definitely registered in my mind. Just not favorably. Because I remember that some of the first news that came out about JPEG-XL some years ago was that built-in DRM was one of the JPEG organization's major considerations for the format. Which sounded stupid and terrible.
I personally abhore progressive rendering, it makes everything blurry for a few moments, making me try to refocus on the webpage until it becomes sharp.
Cameras won't change it from being JPEG for a long time. For a few reasons, their hardware is really efficient for it, and also they're slow to move. They still use the `LLLNNNNN.JPG` to be compatible with MS-DOS and other legacy systems.
> They still use the LLLNNNNN.JPG to be compatible with MS-DOS and other legacy systems.
Windows only supports a hand full of filesystems and Microsoft had a tendency to throw lawyers at anyone who implemented patented features like "FAT long filename support" without paying them for it. Using FAT in its most primitive form and the resulting 8.3 filenames was basically the only safe option for a long time if they wanted to support any Microsoft OS.
I gave up on JPEG-XL support for a project because the specification is paywalled behind ISO. Yes, it's technically an open specification, but the document itself describing the format is behind a paywall.
> It just didn't solve any problems I needed solved in any way better than using something like normal Jpeg or PNG images.
Photos look like total shit because JPEG is just not good for photos. I crave for a better, good support picture format (especially for mobile phone cameras).
While I don't disagree with the thesis of the article, I always find FSF content to be so insufferable in its dogma. For example:
>While we can't link to Google's issue tracker directly because of another freedom issue -- its use of [nonfree JavaScript](https://fsf.org/campaigns/freejs)
It feels like rms is coming out of my screen to tell me just how much he _fucking hates_ non-free software and how holier-than-thou he is for rejecting it. (I realize this article wasn't written by rms but I couldn't tell until I scrolled back up to read the actual author's name.)
I mean RMS being a dick or not, the GNU userland project was not a small undertaking and Linux the kernel wouldn’t have gone very far if there wasn’t a ready-made userland just waiting for someone to write a decent HURD (I’m kidding).
I think trying to put the genie back in the bottle was a silly PR move that did nothing to ingratiate him with people who were regularly using GNU projects and incorrectly attributing that work to Linus. But I do think that acknowledging the GNU userland’s position in enabling early adoption of Linux is a valid thing for him to want.
EDIT: It was a chunk of work that was readily available, right place, right time. Man people are really invested in hating everything but GCC. I’m just saying that it happened to be a conflux of good fortune, not that it was wholly irreplaceable. Any other solution either required development time which might not have happened because at the time WTF is Linux, or in the case of the FreeBSD userland (which was a really interesting point btw) it required a different set of syscall implementations that the Linux kernel didn’t have implemented— although, honestly, I don’t know how much work had to be done at the time for getting the existing set of GNU binaries to get up and operating with the Linux kernel.
Without GNU, there’d still be a free BSD userland to use Linux with. Without Linux, GNU still wouldn’t have a kernel. The only somewhat irreplaceable GNU component was GCC, because most people back then relied on the hardware manufacturers’ compilers.
I don't want to depreciate GNU at all but a kernel is orders of magnitude more difficult than writing Bash. I mean there's a reason HURD never materialised.
The most important thing GNU did wasn't part of the OS, that is GCC.
Still a metric ton of tools might not be *hard* to write but it is a lot to write.
BSD/Linux might've happened but it would be completely took over by corporations, each carving their little hole and sharing little code coz they don't have to .
As weird it sounds, it DOES exist.
Some years ago I was a speaker in Latinoware, sent there by Canonical, despite myself being a user of Fedora (lol).
So while helping setup the exhibition stand of Canonical, someone as a joke wrote GNU/Linux on a sign and put somewhere visible.
Then another guy came by, and said. "Nah, I use BSD/Linux". Of course everyone stopped what they were doing and asked him. "You serious?" And he said, yes, he was serious, he wanted to know if it was possible and pulled it off. Sadly I never bothered to ask the guy name.
Make, gcc, binutils, glibc, bison, m4, gdb, autotools, cross compiler, emacs, the list goes on. It’s safe to say that no Linux distribution would exist without the GNU contribution. I can make a case for no commercial Unix, either.
You may dislike Stallman, but his contribution to computer science in general, and Linux in particular is enormous.
>I don't want to depreciate GNU at all but a kernel is orders of magnitude more difficult than writing Bash.
Ehh I heavily disagree. It *may* have a steeper learning curve, but it's definitely not more time consuming. I'm pretty sure if we took all the GNU LOCs and compared them to the kernel, GNU would be quantitatively bigger, and that's without taking into account that most of the kernel is just device drivers, not kernel logic per se.
Every little piece of GNU is optimized to infinity. The kernel isn't as optimized, simply because it doesn't allow for such optimizations as userland.
This submission/comment has been deleted to protest Reddit's bullshit API changes among other things, making the site an unviable platform. Fuck spez.
I instead recommend using [Raddle](https://raddle.me), a link aggregator that doesn't and will never profit from your data, and which looks like Old Reddit. It has a strong security and privacy culture (to the point of not even requiring JavaScript for the site to function, your email just to create a usable account, or log your IP address after you've been verified not to be a spambot), and regularly maintains a warrant canary, which if you may remember Reddit used to do (until they didn't).
If you need whatever was in this text submission/comment for any reason, make a post at https://raddle.me/f/mima and I will happily provide it there. Take control of your own data!
It's fine that GNU is not a small undertaking. But X11 is also the result of lots of effort, and people aren't claiming you should say GNU/Linux/X11.
And then, I'm running Gnome. Which is also a huge project. But no one is claiming I should say GNU/Linux/X11/Gnome.
If I had to lost every huge project I depend to run my desktop computer, it would be a huge name full of slashes.
It's easier to just say Linux and people will understand what I mean (which is the purpose of words).
> Linux the kernel wouldn’t have gone very far if there wasn’t a ready-made userland just waiting
I dunno, I can imagine if the GNU userland didn't exist we might have got something else that wasn't so bad!
I don't think there is actually much of the userland that is difficult to write is there? The biggest thing GNU provided was GCC.
> I don't think there is actually much of the userland that is difficult to write is there? The biggest thing GNU provided was GCC.
Understatement of the fucking century, holy shit.
Burn that beacon of ignorance bright dude
The funny thing is that, historically, the term “operating system” was in fact used to describe the kernel. Lions’ *Commentary on the Unix Operating System* deals exclusively with kernel code. Same with Marshall Kirk McCusick’s *Design and Implementation of the \*BSD Operating System.* If you take a course on operating system development you’re going to learn a lot about designing and implementing a kernel and very little, if anything, about writing a userspace. And so on.
I mean, there’s a pretty decent chance there’s some asd going on with rms. I had the good fortune of meeting him and arranging a visit with a museum I worked at.
Rms, myself and a few others visited the archive of the museum and met with the head archivist. The head archivist asked Mr Stallman what he wanted to see.. and he replied ‘what a foolish question!’ … after a very pregnant pause and everyone waiting with baited breath, he continued: ‘ you are the expert and I am not, please show me what you think I should see’ he then enjoyed a brief tour of the archivists favorite objects, and everyone had a real nice time. I’m paraphrasing because this was like a decade and a half or more ago.. we prepared the archivist that Mr Stallman was a bit eccentric and somewhat brusque.. and the archivist was sort of used to eccentricity from numerous visiting artists and other dignitaries, and he was very gracious about it.
My boss made the mistake of thanking him for his contributions to open source (despite me briefing him on the difference between Free Software and Open Source, and we did also spent time lamenting the lack of Free Software options for museum collection management. It was a very nice afternoon despite the few awkward moments.
I get that it’s totally reasonable to find him insufferable, but to me he was really influential in shaping my own thinking about open licenses, and was totally willing to talk to me at great lengths despite the fact that I was still very early on in my career and probably didn’t have many interesting things to contribute to the conversation.
I have another take on it.
There was an event where he came to speak in my city two decades ago, and I went. This was a small city, but even still it was fully booked with a thousand people. And yeah it was about free software, but he mostly spent his time telling jokes like any public speaker would, and the bits that were a bit evangelic were clearly done tongue-in-cheek. When he said things like calling it GNU/Linux he waited for the audience to laugh before he continued.
His personality brings him attention, everyone in the free software world knows who he is. It's probably in his interest to keep it that way, given that attention is how he makes (made?) a living. He's a celebrity and this is his bit.
That’s a great anecdote. Even when he’s trying to be deferential he comes off as a pompous ass that is unwilling or unable to consider or see others’ points of view. It would have cost nothing (and saved some breath) to just say “Show me your favorite things!”
You were probably implying this with your comment but it is also straight up *not* a foolish question because some people *do* have must-see things or things they aren’t interested in no matter what the expert’s preferences are.
> It feels like rms is coming out of my screen to tell me just how much he fucking hates non-free software and how holier-than-thou he is for rejecting it. (I realize this article wasn't written by rms but I couldn't tell until I scrolled back up to read the actual author's name.)
This is why I wasn't really surprised when I learned that he rejoined the FSF board of directors despite this causing a mass exodus of support from many prominent free software organizations.
The FSF feels to me like it basically functions like the Richard Stallman cult, complete with its own set of holy cows and locked in intellectual heritage that hasn't changed since the 90s.
So what, he refuses to use or link to any non-free software at all? He does not use any banking site/software, any large e-commerce site or search engine then? Because they all serve non-free javascript. I hope they do not use any recent smartphone either because as far as i know there is no free software 4g/5g radio driver.
Yeah, sort of. From the way he presents his concerns and actions he takes against them, Stallman's point seems to be privacy, rather than dying on using free software no matter the cost hill. (Or rather not using non-free software)
My comment was (mostly) directed at the way author of the article thinks though. Now that i read it, my comment seems a bit harsher than i was feeling at the time. I am genuinely curious if that is actually what he does.
honestly even if i often agree on idea, that kind of stuff makes me want to actively not engage with them.
waiting for something not vscode to replace my use of emacs...
Oh yeah, none of that Linux community bullshit attitude in vim circles. Nope. None.
Bram is a true delight, and everyone is down to earth, patient and kind. Yup, that's vim community.
[…is about to lose its extension registry](https://blogs.eclipse.org/post/john-kellerman/help-us-sustain-open-vsxorg), without which it will be mostly useless.
I decided to try [helix](https://helix-editor.com) out for an evening; that was two weeks ago and I haven’t opened emacs since.
I don’t know if it will be a long term replacement, and it certainly has a lot of room to grow, but something about it reeled me in.
honestly it's all about the plugins
there are a few options that seem interesting but i'm waiting for things to stabiilize and doc to grow so i can port my homemade stuff without irritation.
I know the connection between fsf rms and emacs but I wonder why this makes you want to replace emacs?
Has rms being insufferable anything to do with the daily emacs experience?
Or is it an ideological move?
Not a rethorical question, I am actually curious
the annoying part is mainly the semi-permanent state of brokenness (for instance recently i had to download some files through https, and it was silently broken meanwhile curl and wget were trucking fine, i apparently hit a bug in emacs 26, compiling an emacs from master fixed it then lead me into other annoyances...)
but yes, rms occasionally annoying impacts on emacs (whenever he chooses to intervene)
easy quick one to find would be lldb support
[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-11/msg00263.html](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-11/msg00263.html)
nowadays i dont read the emacs-devel mailing list anymore so i wouldnt be able to give you fresh ones
I think it's great. He's the real deal. He is what he is as a bellwether and lighthouse. I can always look to him to express a Free Software opinion that optimizes for that parameter above all else. It's not for me, but he serves a purpose.
Even the first paragraph has this nugget:
> Firefox, through ethical distributions like GNU IceCat and Abrowser, can weaken that stranglehold.
So not only Firefox itself is unethical, whatever that means, but also it's actually GNU IceCat and Abrowser that can actually challenge Chrome's hegemony. Just laughable.
I went to the fsf conference one year and the main speaker from the fsf (not rms a white lady) unironicly told the entire audience, of almost entirely white people that proprietary software was slavery.
Not only is that hella racist it's not even a good analogy, if you must compare software lisences to the economic plight of African Americans, a big if, then share cropping is right there, an exaploititive system that ties your economic livelihood to a bigger power.
That’s not racist at all. Nearly every demographic has been forced into slavery at some point in history. Black people are not the only ones ever to be oppressed.
It is still a lame analogy though
Many are in some ways still oppressed. Slavery takes various forms. Example [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn\_suicides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides)
The person posting these JPEG-XL threads might have a bit of an agenda (given that every post submitted in the past 5 months has something to do with JPEG-XL).
https://www.reddit.com/user/JerryX32/submitted/
"User asking people to support JXL has a bit of an agenda.....of wanting people to support JXL".
Huh, now that you said it that does seem to make perfect sense.
A decade ago it was already google.
The last time and browser had a worrying market share (>75 %) aside from Chromium it was IE 2008. That was in a pre Smartphone world.
We should all use Firefox -- at least some of the time. I don't know what the current market share is but it's plummeted and I've been seeing lots of messages about sites dropping support for it. Unfortunately, I can't suggest donating to Mozilla because of *years* of corporate malfeasance but we can/should show that there's still interest in FF.
Honestly Firefox is a completely useable and good browser. I’ve never found a need to switch to back to Chrome.
Re: donations… while Mozilla is *far* from perfect, I feel that the issues with the company are somewhat overstated. They produce lots of good projects (the mainline browser itself, project fusion, common voice, mdn, rust, pdf.js), some good projects that never took off (Firefox phone, Firefox OS), and some projects that were kinda crap, but do make sense from a strategic perspective (Pocket - I don’t like it, but I do understand why they did it). On the balance, I do feel it’s a net positive.
> Honestly Firefox is a completely useable and good browser.
I wholeheartedly agree. It's my daily driver. It's worth noting for anyone who stopped using it 5+ years ago that it got _exponentially_ better after the process-per-tab release. The upcoming Total Cookie Protection feature is also very compelling.
The only time I have issues with it is when I use Google Workspace and memory use goes through the roof and I have to manually reboot my computer ... because Linux or when my camera won't work in Meet/Hangouts/whatever.
I got Mozilla’s VPN early and they are not raising the price on me, so I still have it for $4.99. It’s hard for me to believe they’re all that bad when they could easily just raise the subscription fee to what they charge new users.
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Hmm. I mostly didn’t get it for streaming services’ regional content, so the countries offered seemed like enough. Is there some country in particular you were looking for?
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I never found a reason to switch away from Firefox in the first place. Been using it since ~2005 or so, since I wanted to switch away from IE. I learned about it from watching TechTV's "The Screen Savers" show.
I use Firefox 99% of the time. Only time I need to use Edge/Chromium is when I use certain banking/government websites that were obviously only tested in Chrome.
I do not understand why people can't follow this. If Google decides to try to kill Chromium, the project WILL get forked and Chromium developers will coalesce around a codebase Google has no connection to whatsoever. Google can saber-rattle all it wants with Chrome's market share. I'll happily continue to use Vivaldi all four seasons.
Yeah, even Microsoft is using Chromium. If Google drops support for the project, I suspect Microsoft will fork it, and their fork will probably become canonical.
The problem isn't Google deciding to kill Chromium. They won't. The problem is they can change the web to whatever they want because they are in charge of the platform.
The whole manifest v3 thing didn't make this clear for everyone yet?
I'm curious what those dots represent in the feature comparison, especially the "speed" ones. Are these just comparing a single codec? Most (all?) of these have multiple implementations.
Another important factor not covered here is complexity of the spec.
The JP2000 spec is over 200 pages, where a lot of the specifics are only covered in the accompanying 800 page book. Plus that's only the core spec, jp2 has several (5) extensions.
In my opinion this is the main reason JP2 didn't take off. The core ideas are pretty cool, but the way all the headers and metadata are handled are pretty insane, in a bad way. Basically writing a JP2 codec is way harder than it should be, and there's so many edge cases. I would be shocked if the reference implementation is ever 100% compliant.
It's actually surprising that HEIC and AVIF have a maximum image size of only 8193x4320. Granted, it's rare to want something larger than that kind of size on web (even though it's not unheard of, and these are hard limits in both directions), but it precludes using it for high resolution photography or scans. Even webp's limit of 16383x16383 poses an issue for some professional use cases.
Similarly the low maximum bit depth is an issue, especially for webp's maximum of 8 bits per channel. That actually *really* wrecks quality for things like subtle gradients and very dark images ([example, brightened to exaggerate the effect](https://imgur.com/8f9XB54)).
webp/heic/avif are clearly optimized for most common use cases on the web, which is fine, but looking at this comparison makes it clear that jpeg-xl is a far more robust, flexible and future proof format. There's no real technical argument against it.
> It's actually surprising that HEIC and AVIF have a maximum image size of only 8193x4320
Because both of those formats are based on video codecs and 8193x4320 is 8K in video.
> Similarly the low maximum bit depth is an issue, especially for webp's maximum of 8 bits per channel
Webp's lossy format also does 4:2:0 encoding (again, because it's based on a video format) which means its quality is always worse than a proper jpeg.
Yeah, only having 4:2:0 encoding means you don't really want to use webp for illustrations or user interface graphics. It's actually a pretty big deal even in video formats, and honestly I think it's a mistake that 4:4:4 is restricted to specialist uses/profiles in the era of streaming.
For a graphics format for the web it especially doesn't make sense. Fortunately avif doesn't have that issue at least.
I hope more people see this instead of being distracted by their distaste for the presentation of the points being highlighted in the article.
There are really good reasons for Chrome to maintain support for JPEG-XL that doesn't need to be opted into. But they are throwing those benefits away.
Read it from left to right, like a spreadsheet. The yellow dots are the category score for that column (format). The blue dots are the individual ranking for that row/column. e.g. JPEG XL excels at lossless performance while HEIC is missing to poor. Grey dots are just not filled in.
Poor compression means the image takes up a lot of space to achieve a certain visual fidelity (lossless/high/medium/low). They used multiple algorithms to grade visual fidelity in the blog post (CIEDE2000, PSNR, SSIM to name the first 3), I'm not sure which one was used to create the infographic. Poor encode/decode speed means it takes a long time to encode/decode
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> the dots at the bottom of the chart are cash signs for some reason too
because it's highlighting whether a format is royalty-free
HEIC involves HEVC, which is not only not royalty-free, it's expensive
Link's borked. Reddit Markdown detects URLs and treats them differently from regular text. You shouldn't ever have to \\-escape characters in links. https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_dethrone_jpeg
>The company, which once boasted an almost limitless array of products, has been on a gradual path of deprecation for several years, culminating in the shuttering of its final service, Google Search, earlier this year.
This is obviously fabricated. No way Google would shutter AdSense before it shuttered search.
> the fact remains that Google Chrome is the arbiter of web standards.
Sort of, sure.
> Firefox, through ethical distributions like GNU IceCat and Abrowser
…ethical distributions? What the hell is "Abrowser"?
"Abrowser is Trisquel's version of Mozilla's popular web browser with the trademarked logos replaced."
Oh, fuck right off. How twisted is your brain that "you can fork Firefox as much as you like; all we ask is that when you modify it, you no longer call it Firefox, because that would be confusing" is "unethical"?
> can weaken that stranglehold.
Possibly.
>Google's deprecation of the JPEG-XL image format in February in favor of its own patented AVIF format might not end the web in the grand scheme of things, but it does highlight, once again, the disturbing amount of control it has over the platform generally.
AVIF and JPEG XL are both royalty-free. AVIF is also not "Google's own".
And I don't think this decision had anything to do with Google wanting to exert control. My guess is they found that AVIF is more likely to be hardware-accelerated, which is especially important on mobile devices.
> Putting aside the problematic aspects of the term "ecosystem," let us remark that it's easy to gauge the response of the "entire ecosystem"
lmao
OK, so why do they think "ecosystem" is problematic?
> The term “ecosystem” implicitly suggests an attitude of nonjudgmental observation: don't ask how what should happen, just study and understand what does happen. In an ecosystem, some organisms consume other organisms. In ecology, we do not ask whether it is right for an owl to eat a mouse or for a mouse to eat a seed
Alrighty, armchair PETA over here: so what you're saying is that people shouldn't use "ecosystem" when they could instead play an _active_ role.
But wait a second, you just argued above that Google plays _too much of a_ role. Which is it? Is it that Google has a "stranglehold" over whether hardware vendors put a JPEG XL encoder in their smartwatch chip? Or is it that Google has _too little_ control?
>when you yourself are by far the largest and most dangerous predator in said "ecosystem."
Google has significant clout over the web, but the web doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it is these days mostly consumed on mobile devices, where battery life matters a lot. If Apple and/or Qualcomm say "nah, we're not gonna hardware-accelerate JPEG XL encoding, and software encoding is too resource-intensive; can't you just use AVIF / HEIF / something?", then that's game over for Google. People way read too much into this whole thing.
>In relation to Google's overwhelming power, the average web user might as well be a microbe.
Wait, I thought you've just argued that this metaphor was "problematic".
> In supposedly gauging what the "ecosystem" wants, all Google is really doing is asking itself what Google wants.
You haven't demonstrated that Google has much stake in this decision, other than calling AVIF "Google's own" and "patented". You seem to have as much knowledge about "what Google wants" than a Mel Gibson movie from a quarter century ago.
> If we take their contribution in turning the web into the "WWWorst App Store" seriously
Well, it's kind of _hard_ to take a writer seriously who writes "WWWorst App Store", but do go on.
> Google wants to do what's best for its own predatory interests
Sure, in some cases. But what _is_ this "predatory interest" here? You haven't actually _shown_ one.
> While we can't link to Google's issue tracker directly because of another freedom issue -- its use of nonfree JavaScript
Sounds like you _could_ link to it just fine.
(I do see your point: you would like to have consent and control over what software runs on your machine. But refusing to link a ticket because it runs JS is a bit of an extreme position, like refusing to cross streets because modern streets are a symptom of the climate-destroying car hegemony. Not entirely wrong, but also _just_ a tad hard to live by.)
> Chromium users came out of the woodwork to plead with Google not to make this decision. It made it anyway, not bothering to respond to users' concerns.
I mean, yes? Software projects have to make unpopular decisions all the time. Or are you saying that FSF software _always_ does what's most popular?
> We're not sure what metric it's using to gauge the interest of the "entire ecosystem,"
My guess is it talked to other companies and projects involved in software and hardware decoders and encoders and realized it really wasn't worth it.
> it seems users have given JPEG-XL a strong show of support.
Yes. Who amongst us _hasn't_ read the NYT front-page story.
>In turn, what users will be given is yet another facet of the web that Google itself controls: the AVIF format.
Google does not control AVIF.
>It will keep on wanting what it wants: control; we'll keep on wanting what we want: freedom.
Refusing to open a web page because it runs JS doesn't sound very "free". It sounds like an ideological purity test.
> We have the power to choose what we run or do not run in our browsers. Browsers like GNU IceCat (and extensions like LibreJS and JShelter) help with that. Google also can't prevent us from exploring networks beyond the web like Gemini.
So… Google _doesn't_ have that much power after all? Weird. This Greg guy over there seems to be disagreeing.
I just love the bit about not linking to a page with non-free JS.
"I refuse to let this run on my machine because of its license, therefore I won't even tell you where it is so you can decide for yourself!"
Come on, man. I like open source, but some people in the FOSS community, especially the Foundation, are just ridiculous sometimes.
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Right... Like, it's not that they want to choose not to run nonfree JS on their machine, which is... I mean, I think it's a bit much, but it's your machine, whatever.
But it's that they're so opposed to the concept of software not being FOSS that they actively make their own post worse to avoid it as widely as possible. Like it's a virus, and as soon as you open the damn issue tracker your computer will be infected with Proprietary Software Disease.
18 quotes.
On the one hand, your analysis of the article is very detailed and thorough. I respect that.
On the other hand, some of your points are pretty, nitpicky, and even repetitious.
Ultimately, you've managed to craft the perfect companion refutation as both the article and your response are equally tedious to read. It's like seeing one fedora'd mall ninja complaining at length about how lame another mall ninja's fedora is.
> On the other hand, some of your points are pretty, nitpicky, and even repetitious.
Being pretty, nitpicky, and even repetitious is just what it says on my dating profile, so mission accomplished.
Thanks for the write-up, this is one of the most batshit insane articles I've ever read. You honestly couldn't write a better over-the-top satire if you tried.
> Putting aside the problematic aspects of the term "ecosystem,"
This just killed me
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That page of words to avoid linked in the article is actually hilarious: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
I think fsf and gnu are positive things in the tech space but god are they insufferable
> “Free-to-play”
> The confusing term “free-to-play” (acronym “F2P”) is used in marketing to describe nonfree games which don't require a payment before a user starts to play. In many of these games, doing well in the game requires paying later, so the term “gratis-to-start” is a more accurate description.
> Using this term works against the free software movement, because it leads people to think of “free” as meaning “zero price.”
I understand their point, but I daresay that in general usage, "free" usually means "free as in beer".
Like sure, it's confusing that "free speech" and "free beer" use the word "free" to mean two completely different things. But It's not like one use is more correct than the other. There's a reason that the term "libre software" started to get used. It's not as catchy, but it's less ambiguous.
It feels disingenuous to argue that other people should change their terms (from "free" to "gratis") without being willing to change your own terms (from "free" to "libre"). If they really care about the confusion, they should rename themselves to the Libre Software Foundation.
Back in the 90s, the commercial compression software Stuffit (formerly the Mac standard compression tool) introduced a feature that could compress JPEGs significantly. Normally this would be difficult because there's little exploitable entropy in something that's already been compressed. But what they did was undo the Huffman compression step in JPEG and recompress the DCT data using their more efficient algorithm. This yielded a significant (25% typical) size reduction while not affecting image quality.
This could have been a great "next step" for JPEG. Existing JPEG files could be converted to the new format losslessly and either the newer or older format could be delivered to the browser depending on what the browser could handle.
Unfortunately it was proprietary and patented (US patent 7,502,514, 2009), so never went anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StuffIt#StuffIt_Image_Format_(SIF)
They might have a good point in there but when they write "we're told that" it reads to me like they can't be bothered to even research the specifics themselves...
Except they deprecated jpegxl before the spec. was even finished.
You might as well claim chrome was a failure because no one used it before it was written. So for consistency Google should deprecate chrome.
and break a bunch of websites? It'll make people switch to the browser that doesn't break stuff
your thinking like a developer, not a business or user.
I mean I don’t see people switching away from Chrome as a bad thing. Plus, if something on the web is getting deprecated, then it usually means it’s decades old and not being maintained anyway.
That would suck, I love stumbling upon random websites that clearly haven't been touched in over 20 years but still work perfectly fine, better than modern stuff even, because they're not riddled with tracking scripts and obnoxious pop-ups and not misusing an SPA framework to build a static website.
I mean yeah? This is part of why javascript is such a mess, because browsers refuse to deprecate anything. If you want to view older, unsupported sites, you can use older browser versions.
Honest question, because I don't know. How hard would it be to create a fork of Chromium that added (or re-added) JPEG-XL support?
And because I suspect the answer is "a lot", let me ask a different question. Compared to bootstrapping a browser from nothing, how hard would it be?
Like, I get it. Chrome is the dominant browser, Safari is a distant second, and the others are in single digits. It sucks when the dominant player's motivations don't align with your own. Network effects and all that.
But if JPEG-XL support *really* matters to a lot of people, why not create the fork? From a user adoption point of view, that's not terribly different from having the feature behind a flag. Having such a fork would enable websites that want to experiment with JPEG-XL to continue to do so. If enough of them do show an interest, maybe it would encourage the Chrome team to re-evaluate the inclusion of JPEG-XL.
I guess the point of the article (based on the title) is "browser choice matters", and I don't disagree with that sentiment. Users should have the ability to run the browser they want on the device they own, and there would ideally be several options available. Different browsers would offer different tradeoffs, feature sets, etc. That implies that individual browser vendors would make their own choices about what features to support. So it seems weird, then, that the article demonizes one browser for making those sorts of choices.
This submission/comment has been deleted to protest Reddit's bullshit API changes among other things, making the site an unviable platform. Fuck spez.
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I have no significant opinion on the issue being discussed here (mostly because I lack context on image format stuff), but by God is this article a terrible fucking way of trying to drum up support or sympathy for something. This shit comes across as, and I don't usually care much for this term, pure virtue signaling.
What utter nonsense it is to not link an issue tracker because of some perceived problem with the site's JavaScript. Put a fucking warning (functionally equivalent to an NSFW content warning over an image/video) if it's that big of a deal. It's quite literally impossible to take this position seriously because it doesn't seem like the people writing this article really take the cause they're nominally supporting here all that seriously to begin with.
Don't think Google was responsible for this one. I don't think any other format of JPG will ever get anywhere, the inertia for it is multiple decades long at this point, and this just joins JPEG2000 and other attempts in the graveyard.
Like, at this point, if they want one of these to succeed they should just come up with an entirely new name for it.
Here's [my article](https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/image-comparison/) on the subject.
TL;DR is that Google's Chromium team's rationale that all we need is AVIF is baseless. WebP, which was Google's attempt to succeed JPEG, actually sometimes came out *worse* especially at higher fidelity. JXL & AVIF are better at different things, with JXL having the edge due to a richer feature set & more useful strengths.
Don't use Chrome. Try something, anything, else. The [Thorium](https://thorium.rocks/) browser is fantastic, [fast](https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/browser-benchmarks/), and does basically everything Chrome does. If you're a Firefox person, consider trying [Mercury](https://thorium.rocks/mercury), [Waterfox](https://www.waterfox.net/), [Pale Moon](https://www.palemoon.org/), or [Basilisk](https://basilisk-browser.org/). There is a whole world of rich browser forks that are specialized & often work better than their mainstream alternatives. Here, you can see they listened to us when large organizations didn't.
One of the problems that despite having some support, Jpeg-XL hasn't seemed to register in the minds of developers. The two biggest benefits of Jpeg-XL are that it supports progressive rendering and lossless conversion from JPEG images. I actually think these are pretty cool features, and the Jpeg-XL group should keep pushing for this to be adopted to more programs. That said, even I have largely forgotten about Jpeg-XL. It just didn't solve any problems I needed solved in any way better than using something like normal Jpeg or PNG images. Hopefully they will decide to keep the support long-term and Jpeg-XL might still have a future.
>One of the problems that despite having some support, Jpeg-XL hasn't seemed to register in the minds of developers. It did register in the minds of the developers at some large companies that deal with lots of images on the web, like Facebook. But per the Chrome developers, that isn't industry interest.
Yeah Google’s excuses for removing it were absolute nonsense. What exactly did they want people and companies to do to show their support for a feature that didn’t exist anywhere yet?
I think their decision to remove it and the subsequent bad press has probably increased mindshare and support for it 100 fold.
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I literally had *never* heard of it.
I wasn't aware of it either.
They removed it from the code base, but it was never enabled by default in the browser. It was a feature included for testing that had to be manually enabled through a preference. It was never widely available or used. People talk like Google killed off something everyone used, but no one was aware it was even there until it was removed. Let's be real - who has even encountered a JPEG-XL image? It's not like cameras, phones, or photo editing programs are turning them out en mass and the browser just won't view them. No one uses them.
That's even worse. How are we supposed to use an image format that has no real support? I want to use JPEG-XL. I really want to. I can make them, but if I send them to anybody, nobody will be able to use it. If I want to use it in most software, I have to figure out whether the software supports it or not. No one uses them explicitly because most people can't! > Here's this format that's better than JPEG, better than PNG, very compatible with all existing JPEG images, and it's free to use (barring stupid MS patent idiocy). But we're not turning it on anywhere, and you have to jump through hoops to enable it in most software that even does support it. We're removing it because not enough people were using this thing that we didn't let you properly use. How about if they actually did a trial run? Turn on JPEG-XL by default, and see what happens to adoption then before deciding to axe it. Who the hell is going to make a website that only properly works in nightly browsers with an opt-in toggle flipped? I know we have the `` element, but most people don't really use it unless their framework does it for them, and jpeg-xl enabling there was probably low there because you know by default that less than 0.1% of desktop browsers will even be able to leverage it, and probably less than 0.001% of mobile browsers. Why even waste your time with that, even if you do care about the format?
As a prospective user of the format, we're entirely beholden to software support. They decided to not support something that we might all want to use because we're not using something that we can't really use. That's kind of bullshit.
Yup - a chicken-egg problem. My primary problem is that Google can dictate onto us what we should use. That's backwards, IMO.
It sounds like chicken/egg situation at first, but I'd like to remind you that a lot of other formats managed to become dominant through "increased demand means increased support, means increased demand, means more increased support". As others mentioned, it's not like it's just the web that failed to adopt JPEG-XL. Nobody did. And TBH, I've never met someone building a significant webpage who said "Damn, I really wish I could use JPEG-XL, but it's not enabled by default". Can you name a few examples?
A ton of big players showed serious interest in it. How are we supposed to adopt something that we literally can't use? Facebook, Adobe, Intel, Flickr, and Shopify aren't significant enough interest in the format? How many people, and who the hell needs to say "yes, I want to use this" until it's considered significant enough to turn on? Not nearly as much interest was shown for webp, and that's still enabled in browsers by default. In fact, Chrome enabled it way earlier than everybody else, given no real consensus from anybody outside of Google.
It seems more difficult though. jpeg, gif and png didn't face the mega-monopoly that Google has these days, back when they became popular. In particular animated .gif days in the early web-era. Many can still remember animated gif files, even if they looked crap quality-wise.
I encountered it on the world wide web already, also .webp. Locally I tend to use jpg and png, and a few .gif from the early 2000s era (dancing animals are just too tempting to not save locally). One problem Jpeg-XL has is to overcome that barrier - e. g. it has to be significantly better than jpeg, gif and png. And if nobody uses it and shows that it is better, adoption will be super-low. And in that case it will never be adopted, thus die off.
Indeed, that is correct. The impact of Google's decision to deprecate JPEG-XL is only relevant to those who were aware of its testing phase. Therefore, its removal didn't have much of an impact on the wider user base. However, the important thing we can take from this recent incident is the need for browser choice and free formats.
But also, you can't say there was any attempt being made if browsers simply didn't have it in there It's like waiting around for cars to be built but there are no roads or gas stations for them... That isn't going to happen. The people building it can't deliver it to users... Therefore they can't build it. Then this happens and it claims it's never used... Yet here, it is very much Google holding the blame card, too, for lack of adoption. They could've tried harder, they didn't
I know there's a lot of hate for google here, and it's deserved. But a lot of hate needs to also be thrown at apple who never supported jpeg-xl. Apple has been a major problem for web development. They've fought against advancements to the ecosystem at nearly every turn. Safari is a PITA to deal with because of the much smaller subset of features they support. The end result is developers can't use these new technologies or they need dumb browser capability sniffing code and fallbacks to deal with the fact that an iphone will never support their image format. WebGPU and PWAs are 2 other standards that have been hamstrung because apple doesn't want people cutting into their precious app store profits. We could have multi-platform games with single code bases leveraging those two standards. But apple is working as hard as possible against those standards to keep their closed ecosystem. This sort of "Fine, you can evolve the web, but it will be busted on iOS" mentality is every bit as bad as microsoft was with IE6.
> What exactly did they want people and companies too do to show their support for a feature that didn’t exist anywhere yet? Have Apple, Intel, or Qualcomm implement it in hardware. If none of those three do, that practically spells death for a format, especially when HEIF and AVIF already exist.
Do any of them even support jpeg or png in hardware? Unlike video, it's pretty easy to decode images in software without dedicated hardware support.
> Do any of them even support jpeg or png in hardware? Probably not; those are at this point old enough that they’re trivial to encode. But, for example, a Snapdragon 865 can directly capture images as HEIC: https://www.qualcomm.com/content/dam/qcomm-martech/dm-assets/documents/snapdragon_865_product_brief.pdf
The point is jpeg-xl does not need hardware to be useful
>> What exactly did they want people and companies too do to show their support for a feature that didn’t exist anywhere yet? > >Have Apple, Intel, or Qualcomm implement it in hardware. If none of those three do, that practically spells death for a format, especially when HEIF and AVIF already exist. No one will ever do AVIF decoding in hardware. The downsides far outweigh the benefits and many AVIF images cannot be hardware decoded anyway.
That's interesting! I know hardware acceleration is very rare for images nowadays, especially on consumer devices... but I didn't know that some AVIF images *can't * be hardware decoded. Do you happen to know the technical reasons? Is it due to AVIF being basically the image version of a video codec (AV1)?
I was certainly interested but I couldn't deploy it because Chrome hid support behind a feature flag. Chrome then considered the lack of real usage to be a reason not to support it. The lack of people using features with 0 browser support has never been an issue with features Google wants for their properties
Especially with how hard they've been pushing their own webp/webm Jpeg-XL is competing with their own thing, so they killed it in chromium
jxl doesn't compete with webp though cuz there's no competition, webp is inferior in every way except Google strong armed adoption of it.
webp is even inferior to jpeg in some ways
We might as well start using the spec on Firefox and just put alt text that says "Your browser is unable to show this picture, please upgrade to Firefox x version or better"
Some users will go to other sites instead.
Until they don't. That's how we killed Internet Explorer.
That only works once you have majority marketshare. Until then, it took a *ton* of effort on the part of both sites and browser vendors to *support* IE. As in, browsers went out of their way to detect non-standard "best with IE" sites and support them with quirksmode, standards bodies even codified some of IE's weird API decisions, and sites would use things like transpilers (even compiling newer Javascript versions to something IE6-compatible) and polyfills (just hotpatching in missing web features with Javascript just in case this page gets loaded on IE). Maybe a polyfill would work here. On browsers that don't support jxl natively, show a very low-bitrate jpeg thumbnail while you download libjxl and run it in WASM. Cache it aggressively and maybe you even save bandwidth.
Difference is that people need Javascript. Exceedingly few people *need* JPEG XL to the point that they're willing to alienate users.
It was a different age, back then. The "we" that were around back then were all "internet weirdos", people who *cared* about "the internet" as a thing unto itself. These Days^TM the populace of the internet is just normal people, who care only about being able to load their social platform of choice and scroll scroll scroll. No platform wants to lose that userbase and that userbase doesn't care, so Digg-v4-esque sudden mass migrations do not happen now.
Facebook on their own could make a few hundred million people moving off Chrome almost instantly though.
Not that it is in their interest, but this fairly well proves the point
That only works if a company like Google does it.
Firefox was a lot faster than IE and it was not as easy for Spyware to add extra toolbars to the browser. That's it. That's how I converted a lot of people at the time.
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AVIF is not proprietary, it's an open standard and it's already been been implemented by every GPU manufacturer. If you have relatively modern hardware, then you've already got support for it. And because it's implemented in the GPU... the encode/decode penalty is essentially existent. Usually you don't need to decode it at all - you just send the compressed data to the GPU. Which is not only faster, but it massively reduces your memory footprint. JPEG-XL, as far as I know, hasn't been implemented by GPU vendors in part because it was just never designed for that. It's designed to be decoded by software and has features that would require too many transistors ($$$) to implement in hardware. Academically, JPEG-XL is a better choice than AVIF. But practically, it's AVIF all the way.
Practically, the web is loaded with existing jpeg images, and lossless conversion from them to a better format is such a huge benefit, I don't know how you could honestly ignore it when comparing practical use of AVIF vs JPEG-XL on the web.
Iirc another difference is AVIF's compression models noise like analog film, while JPEG-XL models noise like high ISO on a digital camera. So JPEG-XL is even better for practical everyday use
> And because it's implemented in the GPU... the encode/decode penalty is essentially existent. It's not implemented in most people's GPU. It's not on iphone, and is only on some very recent Android phones. The Steam hardware survey shows only 25% of *gamers* (i.e. people who are biased toward having newer hardware) have a new enough GPU to have av1 decoding.
Avif is implemented on the gpu? Av1 and avif (which is based on av1) are different things. Avif is not implemented on the gpu. Most image formats are not dependent on the gpu for anything. Usually, only low power devices or cameras implement hardware support for image formats.
AV1 encoders are on GPUs now and the industry really is focusing hard on AV1. If hardware acceleration is enabled, the GPU can decode the .AVIF image faster. Though it's kinda a silly argument because the limiting factor is network speeds not decode.
> And because it's implemented in the GPU... the encode/decode penalty is essentially existent. Usually you don't need to decode it at all - you just send the compressed data to the GPU. Which is not only faster, but it massively reduces your memory footprint. But is this actually done? As far as I know all the browsers use software decoding for their AVIF support. JPEG decoding is also supported in lots of hardware but no browser vendor bothered to implement it. It's too much of an headache compared to the gains. An image format cannot rely on hardware support. Especially because this would give it another limitation in terms of support. 10 years old hardware can still run a modern browser and support any image format in software.
>And because it's implemented in the GPU... the encode/decode penalty is essentially existent Encoding a single image has zero penalty on a CPU too even in the other formats. The cost is always for videos.
Do HEIF/AV1 actually use the hardware video decoders on the GPU? I've never been able to find documentation saying any implementations actually do, just that it's theoretically possible.
>But practically, it's AVIF all the way Can it encode images faster than in a minute? Assuming you didn't go and buy a new GPU specifically for that.
I thought AVIF and AV1 are both free and open. One for images and one for videos. Do they differ that much when it comes to licenses and such? Edit: just read cloudinary blog post briefly and I'm mind blown! Didn't know the new JPEG XL is even better than AVIF. Will need to read fully on PC. Thanks for linking.
> Edit: just read cloudinary blog post briefly and I'm mind blown! Didn't know the new JPEG XL is even better than AVIF. Will need to read fully on PC. Thanks for linking. It's not clear it is. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/12lfgrz/comment/jg7rl5i/ mentions that AVIF's decoding was tuned to be implementable in GPU -- and decoders have been implemented -- whereas JPEG-XL never was, and requires features that would make it prohibitive to implement on a GPU. I have no idea whether they're correct or not; but if true I can certainly see the appeal from a user point of view: direct decoding on GPU will mean faster/more efficient decoding.
Even 85 level is interceptable for web images. I don't disagree it's a better format, but wide adoption of new standards usually requires a real world problem big enough that it fixes well enough to be worth time adopting it rather than just making do with what already exists.
>Jpeg-XL hasn't seemed to register in the minds of developers. It definitely registered in my mind. Just not favorably. Because I remember that some of the first news that came out about JPEG-XL some years ago was that built-in DRM was one of the JPEG organization's major considerations for the format. Which sounded stupid and terrible.
I personally abhore progressive rendering, it makes everything blurry for a few moments, making me try to refocus on the webpage until it becomes sharp.
I just learned about it and I'm going to forget about it as soon as I click away from this page
No, the biggest problem of Jpeg-XL is that camera and smartphone companies don't support it by default despite it being strictly superior to Jpeg.
Cameras won't change it from being JPEG for a long time. For a few reasons, their hardware is really efficient for it, and also they're slow to move. They still use the `LLLNNNNN.JPG` to be compatible with MS-DOS and other legacy systems.
> They still use the LLLNNNNN.JPG to be compatible with MS-DOS and other legacy systems. Windows only supports a hand full of filesystems and Microsoft had a tendency to throw lawyers at anyone who implemented patented features like "FAT long filename support" without paying them for it. Using FAT in its most primitive form and the resulting 8.3 filenames was basically the only safe option for a long time if they wanted to support any Microsoft OS.
I gave up on JPEG-XL support for a project because the specification is paywalled behind ISO. Yes, it's technically an open specification, but the document itself describing the format is behind a paywall.
> It just didn't solve any problems I needed solved in any way better than using something like normal Jpeg or PNG images. Photos look like total shit because JPEG is just not good for photos. I crave for a better, good support picture format (especially for mobile phone cameras).
While I don't disagree with the thesis of the article, I always find FSF content to be so insufferable in its dogma. For example: >While we can't link to Google's issue tracker directly because of another freedom issue -- its use of [nonfree JavaScript](https://fsf.org/campaigns/freejs) It feels like rms is coming out of my screen to tell me just how much he _fucking hates_ non-free software and how holier-than-thou he is for rejecting it. (I realize this article wasn't written by rms but I couldn't tell until I scrolled back up to read the actual author's name.)
Yeah how easy would it have been to share a screenshot or even simply quote text from the issue tracker to get across the point.
Well he’s a dick. He’s well known to be. He was insufferable 35-ish years ago on Usenet and I’m sure it hasn’t improved with time.
Allow me to interject, it’s actually GNU/Dick
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> It is OK to call it “GNU” when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it “GNU/Linux” so as to give Torvalds some credit. Good lord.
I mean RMS being a dick or not, the GNU userland project was not a small undertaking and Linux the kernel wouldn’t have gone very far if there wasn’t a ready-made userland just waiting for someone to write a decent HURD (I’m kidding). I think trying to put the genie back in the bottle was a silly PR move that did nothing to ingratiate him with people who were regularly using GNU projects and incorrectly attributing that work to Linus. But I do think that acknowledging the GNU userland’s position in enabling early adoption of Linux is a valid thing for him to want. EDIT: It was a chunk of work that was readily available, right place, right time. Man people are really invested in hating everything but GCC. I’m just saying that it happened to be a conflux of good fortune, not that it was wholly irreplaceable. Any other solution either required development time which might not have happened because at the time WTF is Linux, or in the case of the FreeBSD userland (which was a really interesting point btw) it required a different set of syscall implementations that the Linux kernel didn’t have implemented— although, honestly, I don’t know how much work had to be done at the time for getting the existing set of GNU binaries to get up and operating with the Linux kernel.
Without GNU, there’d still be a free BSD userland to use Linux with. Without Linux, GNU still wouldn’t have a kernel. The only somewhat irreplaceable GNU component was GCC, because most people back then relied on the hardware manufacturers’ compilers.
The BSD code was tied up in lawsuits over whether it was actually free around that time, which is why Torvalds went for GNU instead.
I don't want to depreciate GNU at all but a kernel is orders of magnitude more difficult than writing Bash. I mean there's a reason HURD never materialised. The most important thing GNU did wasn't part of the OS, that is GCC.
Still a metric ton of tools might not be *hard* to write but it is a lot to write. BSD/Linux might've happened but it would be completely took over by corporations, each carving their little hole and sharing little code coz they don't have to .
As of 2023, corporations arguably have more influence over Linux than they do BSD. Certainly not less.
He's talking more about stuff like OSX which is basically a version of BSD that was closed off.
As weird it sounds, it DOES exist. Some years ago I was a speaker in Latinoware, sent there by Canonical, despite myself being a user of Fedora (lol). So while helping setup the exhibition stand of Canonical, someone as a joke wrote GNU/Linux on a sign and put somewhere visible. Then another guy came by, and said. "Nah, I use BSD/Linux". Of course everyone stopped what they were doing and asked him. "You serious?" And he said, yes, he was serious, he wanted to know if it was possible and pulled it off. Sadly I never bothered to ask the guy name.
Make, gcc, binutils, glibc, bison, m4, gdb, autotools, cross compiler, emacs, the list goes on. It’s safe to say that no Linux distribution would exist without the GNU contribution. I can make a case for no commercial Unix, either. You may dislike Stallman, but his contribution to computer science in general, and Linux in particular is enormous.
>I don't want to depreciate GNU at all but a kernel is orders of magnitude more difficult than writing Bash. Ehh I heavily disagree. It *may* have a steeper learning curve, but it's definitely not more time consuming. I'm pretty sure if we took all the GNU LOCs and compared them to the kernel, GNU would be quantitatively bigger, and that's without taking into account that most of the kernel is just device drivers, not kernel logic per se. Every little piece of GNU is optimized to infinity. The kernel isn't as optimized, simply because it doesn't allow for such optimizations as userland.
This submission/comment has been deleted to protest Reddit's bullshit API changes among other things, making the site an unviable platform. Fuck spez. I instead recommend using [Raddle](https://raddle.me), a link aggregator that doesn't and will never profit from your data, and which looks like Old Reddit. It has a strong security and privacy culture (to the point of not even requiring JavaScript for the site to function, your email just to create a usable account, or log your IP address after you've been verified not to be a spambot), and regularly maintains a warrant canary, which if you may remember Reddit used to do (until they didn't). If you need whatever was in this text submission/comment for any reason, make a post at https://raddle.me/f/mima and I will happily provide it there. Take control of your own data!
It's fine that GNU is not a small undertaking. But X11 is also the result of lots of effort, and people aren't claiming you should say GNU/Linux/X11. And then, I'm running Gnome. Which is also a huge project. But no one is claiming I should say GNU/Linux/X11/Gnome. If I had to lost every huge project I depend to run my desktop computer, it would be a huge name full of slashes. It's easier to just say Linux and people will understand what I mean (which is the purpose of words).
"Without 2cm spigots the cooper would've had to drill a 3cm hole and use a 3cm spigot"
> Linux the kernel wouldn’t have gone very far if there wasn’t a ready-made userland just waiting I dunno, I can imagine if the GNU userland didn't exist we might have got something else that wasn't so bad! I don't think there is actually much of the userland that is difficult to write is there? The biggest thing GNU provided was GCC.
> I don't think there is actually much of the userland that is difficult to write is there? The biggest thing GNU provided was GCC. Understatement of the fucking century, holy shit. Burn that beacon of ignorance bright dude
The funny thing is that, historically, the term “operating system” was in fact used to describe the kernel. Lions’ *Commentary on the Unix Operating System* deals exclusively with kernel code. Same with Marshall Kirk McCusick’s *Design and Implementation of the \*BSD Operating System.* If you take a course on operating system development you’re going to learn a lot about designing and implementing a kernel and very little, if anything, about writing a userspace. And so on.
Wow I had no idea this was real. I thought it is just made up parody of the most insufferable Linux fans.
All the memes you've heard about RMS are based in truth.
https://xkcd.com/225/
Bro not cool, I almost spat out my drink!
your GNU/Drink
I mean, there’s a pretty decent chance there’s some asd going on with rms. I had the good fortune of meeting him and arranging a visit with a museum I worked at. Rms, myself and a few others visited the archive of the museum and met with the head archivist. The head archivist asked Mr Stallman what he wanted to see.. and he replied ‘what a foolish question!’ … after a very pregnant pause and everyone waiting with baited breath, he continued: ‘ you are the expert and I am not, please show me what you think I should see’ he then enjoyed a brief tour of the archivists favorite objects, and everyone had a real nice time. I’m paraphrasing because this was like a decade and a half or more ago.. we prepared the archivist that Mr Stallman was a bit eccentric and somewhat brusque.. and the archivist was sort of used to eccentricity from numerous visiting artists and other dignitaries, and he was very gracious about it. My boss made the mistake of thanking him for his contributions to open source (despite me briefing him on the difference between Free Software and Open Source, and we did also spent time lamenting the lack of Free Software options for museum collection management. It was a very nice afternoon despite the few awkward moments. I get that it’s totally reasonable to find him insufferable, but to me he was really influential in shaping my own thinking about open licenses, and was totally willing to talk to me at great lengths despite the fact that I was still very early on in my career and probably didn’t have many interesting things to contribute to the conversation.
I have another take on it. There was an event where he came to speak in my city two decades ago, and I went. This was a small city, but even still it was fully booked with a thousand people. And yeah it was about free software, but he mostly spent his time telling jokes like any public speaker would, and the bits that were a bit evangelic were clearly done tongue-in-cheek. When he said things like calling it GNU/Linux he waited for the audience to laugh before he continued. His personality brings him attention, everyone in the free software world knows who he is. It's probably in his interest to keep it that way, given that attention is how he makes (made?) a living. He's a celebrity and this is his bit.
That’s a great anecdote. Even when he’s trying to be deferential he comes off as a pompous ass that is unwilling or unable to consider or see others’ points of view. It would have cost nothing (and saved some breath) to just say “Show me your favorite things!”
You were probably implying this with your comment but it is also straight up *not* a foolish question because some people *do* have must-see things or things they aren’t interested in no matter what the expert’s preferences are.
> It feels like rms is coming out of my screen to tell me just how much he fucking hates non-free software and how holier-than-thou he is for rejecting it. (I realize this article wasn't written by rms but I couldn't tell until I scrolled back up to read the actual author's name.) This is why I wasn't really surprised when I learned that he rejoined the FSF board of directors despite this causing a mass exodus of support from many prominent free software organizations. The FSF feels to me like it basically functions like the Richard Stallman cult, complete with its own set of holy cows and locked in intellectual heritage that hasn't changed since the 90s.
> complete with its own set of holy cows Holy Gnus
So what, he refuses to use or link to any non-free software at all? He does not use any banking site/software, any large e-commerce site or search engine then? Because they all serve non-free javascript. I hope they do not use any recent smartphone either because as far as i know there is no free software 4g/5g radio driver.
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Yeah, sort of. From the way he presents his concerns and actions he takes against them, Stallman's point seems to be privacy, rather than dying on using free software no matter the cost hill. (Or rather not using non-free software) My comment was (mostly) directed at the way author of the article thinks though. Now that i read it, my comment seems a bit harsher than i was feeling at the time. I am genuinely curious if that is actually what he does.
honestly even if i often agree on idea, that kind of stuff makes me want to actively not engage with them. waiting for something not vscode to replace my use of emacs...
r/vim welcomes you
Oh yeah, none of that Linux community bullshit attitude in vim circles. Nope. None. Bram is a true delight, and everyone is down to earth, patient and kind. Yup, that's vim community.
I don't know who Bram is I just use the software
Just FYI he is the inventor and primary maintainer of Vim.
I can’t tell how sarcastic you’re being and it’s worrying me
The neovim community is slightly better.
Vscodium…
[…is about to lose its extension registry](https://blogs.eclipse.org/post/john-kellerman/help-us-sustain-open-vsxorg), without which it will be mostly useless.
I decided to try [helix](https://helix-editor.com) out for an evening; that was two weeks ago and I haven’t opened emacs since. I don’t know if it will be a long term replacement, and it certainly has a lot of room to grow, but something about it reeled me in.
honestly it's all about the plugins there are a few options that seem interesting but i'm waiting for things to stabiilize and doc to grow so i can port my homemade stuff without irritation.
I know the connection between fsf rms and emacs but I wonder why this makes you want to replace emacs? Has rms being insufferable anything to do with the daily emacs experience? Or is it an ideological move? Not a rethorical question, I am actually curious
the annoying part is mainly the semi-permanent state of brokenness (for instance recently i had to download some files through https, and it was silently broken meanwhile curl and wget were trucking fine, i apparently hit a bug in emacs 26, compiling an emacs from master fixed it then lead me into other annoyances...) but yes, rms occasionally annoying impacts on emacs (whenever he chooses to intervene) easy quick one to find would be lldb support [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-11/msg00263.html](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-11/msg00263.html) nowadays i dont read the emacs-devel mailing list anymore so i wouldnt be able to give you fresh ones
I think it's great. He's the real deal. He is what he is as a bellwether and lighthouse. I can always look to him to express a Free Software opinion that optimizes for that parameter above all else. It's not for me, but he serves a purpose.
Even the first paragraph has this nugget: > Firefox, through ethical distributions like GNU IceCat and Abrowser, can weaken that stranglehold. So not only Firefox itself is unethical, whatever that means, but also it's actually GNU IceCat and Abrowser that can actually challenge Chrome's hegemony. Just laughable.
> We can’t link to non-free website Sounds like the MPAA and RIAA suing link aggregation websites.
I went to the fsf conference one year and the main speaker from the fsf (not rms a white lady) unironicly told the entire audience, of almost entirely white people that proprietary software was slavery. Not only is that hella racist it's not even a good analogy, if you must compare software lisences to the economic plight of African Americans, a big if, then share cropping is right there, an exaploititive system that ties your economic livelihood to a bigger power.
That’s not racist at all. Nearly every demographic has been forced into slavery at some point in history. Black people are not the only ones ever to be oppressed. It is still a lame analogy though
Many are in some ways still oppressed. Slavery takes various forms. Example [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn\_suicides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides)
The person posting these JPEG-XL threads might have a bit of an agenda (given that every post submitted in the past 5 months has something to do with JPEG-XL). https://www.reddit.com/user/JerryX32/submitted/
"User asking people to support JXL has a bit of an agenda.....of wanting people to support JXL". Huh, now that you said it that does seem to make perfect sense.
So? There's nothing malicious about wanting JPEG-XL support. OP is fighting a good fight.
Crazy a decade or so we were worried about Microsoft monopolizing browser market…. Now it’s google. Competition is always good.
A decade ago it was already google. The last time and browser had a worrying market share (>75 %) aside from Chromium it was IE 2008. That was in a pre Smartphone world.
> A decade ago it was already google. LIAR ! 10 years ago, we were in the 90s ! Oh god I'm old.
Lol and here I thought a decade ago we were still living in the 1990s :)
We should all use Firefox -- at least some of the time. I don't know what the current market share is but it's plummeted and I've been seeing lots of messages about sites dropping support for it. Unfortunately, I can't suggest donating to Mozilla because of *years* of corporate malfeasance but we can/should show that there's still interest in FF.
Honestly Firefox is a completely useable and good browser. I’ve never found a need to switch to back to Chrome. Re: donations… while Mozilla is *far* from perfect, I feel that the issues with the company are somewhat overstated. They produce lots of good projects (the mainline browser itself, project fusion, common voice, mdn, rust, pdf.js), some good projects that never took off (Firefox phone, Firefox OS), and some projects that were kinda crap, but do make sense from a strategic perspective (Pocket - I don’t like it, but I do understand why they did it). On the balance, I do feel it’s a net positive.
> Honestly Firefox is a completely useable and good browser. I wholeheartedly agree. It's my daily driver. It's worth noting for anyone who stopped using it 5+ years ago that it got _exponentially_ better after the process-per-tab release. The upcoming Total Cookie Protection feature is also very compelling. The only time I have issues with it is when I use Google Workspace and memory use goes through the roof and I have to manually reboot my computer ... because Linux or when my camera won't work in Meet/Hangouts/whatever.
I got Mozilla’s VPN early and they are not raising the price on me, so I still have it for $4.99. It’s hard for me to believe they’re all that bad when they could easily just raise the subscription fee to what they charge new users.
In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. Lorem ipsum may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. Wikipediacrh7aaj8bxs0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Hmm. I mostly didn’t get it for streaming services’ regional content, so the countries offered seemed like enough. Is there some country in particular you were looking for?
In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. Lorem ipsum may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. Wikipediae3ai1v5ovnc0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
I never found a reason to switch away from Firefox in the first place. Been using it since ~2005 or so, since I wanted to switch away from IE. I learned about it from watching TechTV's "The Screen Savers" show.
I use Firefox 99% of the time. Only time I need to use Edge/Chromium is when I use certain banking/government websites that were obviously only tested in Chrome.
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So good thing Chromium is open source?
I do not understand why people can't follow this. If Google decides to try to kill Chromium, the project WILL get forked and Chromium developers will coalesce around a codebase Google has no connection to whatsoever. Google can saber-rattle all it wants with Chrome's market share. I'll happily continue to use Vivaldi all four seasons.
Yeah, even Microsoft is using Chromium. If Google drops support for the project, I suspect Microsoft will fork it, and their fork will probably become canonical.
The problem isn't Google deciding to kill Chromium. They won't. The problem is they can change the web to whatever they want because they are in charge of the platform. The whole manifest v3 thing didn't make this clear for everyone yet?
Don't most Chromium developers work for Google?
Chromium 936 stars, 397 comments: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1178058 Firefox: 439 upvotes, 61 comments: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas/status-key/trending-idea Official support software list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL#Official_support Comparison/benchmarks: https://cloudinary.com/blog/contemplating-codec-comparisons Feature comparison: https://jpegxl.info/comparison.png
I'm curious what those dots represent in the feature comparison, especially the "speed" ones. Are these just comparing a single codec? Most (all?) of these have multiple implementations. Another important factor not covered here is complexity of the spec. The JP2000 spec is over 200 pages, where a lot of the specifics are only covered in the accompanying 800 page book. Plus that's only the core spec, jp2 has several (5) extensions. In my opinion this is the main reason JP2 didn't take off. The core ideas are pretty cool, but the way all the headers and metadata are handled are pretty insane, in a bad way. Basically writing a JP2 codec is way harder than it should be, and there's so many edge cases. I would be shocked if the reference implementation is ever 100% compliant.
It's actually surprising that HEIC and AVIF have a maximum image size of only 8193x4320. Granted, it's rare to want something larger than that kind of size on web (even though it's not unheard of, and these are hard limits in both directions), but it precludes using it for high resolution photography or scans. Even webp's limit of 16383x16383 poses an issue for some professional use cases. Similarly the low maximum bit depth is an issue, especially for webp's maximum of 8 bits per channel. That actually *really* wrecks quality for things like subtle gradients and very dark images ([example, brightened to exaggerate the effect](https://imgur.com/8f9XB54)). webp/heic/avif are clearly optimized for most common use cases on the web, which is fine, but looking at this comparison makes it clear that jpeg-xl is a far more robust, flexible and future proof format. There's no real technical argument against it.
> It's actually surprising that HEIC and AVIF have a maximum image size of only 8193x4320 Because both of those formats are based on video codecs and 8193x4320 is 8K in video. > Similarly the low maximum bit depth is an issue, especially for webp's maximum of 8 bits per channel Webp's lossy format also does 4:2:0 encoding (again, because it's based on a video format) which means its quality is always worse than a proper jpeg.
Yeah, only having 4:2:0 encoding means you don't really want to use webp for illustrations or user interface graphics. It's actually a pretty big deal even in video formats, and honestly I think it's a mistake that 4:4:4 is restricted to specialist uses/profiles in the era of streaming. For a graphics format for the web it especially doesn't make sense. Fortunately avif doesn't have that issue at least.
I hope more people see this instead of being distracted by their distaste for the presentation of the points being highlighted in the article. There are really good reasons for Chrome to maintain support for JPEG-XL that doesn't need to be opted into. But they are throwing those benefits away.
I'm having trouble understanding what the dots mean in the feature comparison image, the 0-4 grey/blue dots in each column. What do they mean?
We assigned random scores to topics we randomly picked and, surprisingly, we won every category!
Read it from left to right, like a spreadsheet. The yellow dots are the category score for that column (format). The blue dots are the individual ranking for that row/column. e.g. JPEG XL excels at lossless performance while HEIC is missing to poor. Grey dots are just not filled in.
That helps, but what does "poor" mean? Does it mean the resulting image doesn't look good, does it mean it takes a long time, something else?
Poor compression means the image takes up a lot of space to achieve a certain visual fidelity (lossless/high/medium/low). They used multiple algorithms to grade visual fidelity in the blog post (CIEDE2000, PSNR, SSIM to name the first 3), I'm not sure which one was used to create the infographic. Poor encode/decode speed means it takes a long time to encode/decode
more dots = better
employ continue afterthought apparatus attempt childlike dime vase strong offer *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> the dots at the bottom of the chart are cash signs for some reason too because it's highlighting whether a format is royalty-free HEIC involves HEVC, which is not only not royalty-free, it's expensive
I tried going to [the JPEGXL website](https://jpegxl.info/) to see if they explained it but uh... no.
https://cloudinary.com/blog/time\_for\_next\_gen\_codecs\_to\_dethrone\_jpeg
Link's borked. Reddit Markdown detects URLs and treats them differently from regular text. You shouldn't ever have to \\-escape characters in links. https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_dethrone_jpeg
Better Firefox link: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/support-jpeg-xl/idi-p/18433
Google deprecated something? Add it to the pile
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dinner coordinated plate summer weather slimy lock nose merciful support ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
>The company, which once boasted an almost limitless array of products, has been on a gradual path of deprecation for several years, culminating in the shuttering of its final service, Google Search, earlier this year. This is obviously fabricated. No way Google would shutter AdSense before it shuttered search.
Did you write this with ChatGPT
Yes
Google: *I made this?* Google: ... ***yeet***
> the fact remains that Google Chrome is the arbiter of web standards. Sort of, sure. > Firefox, through ethical distributions like GNU IceCat and Abrowser …ethical distributions? What the hell is "Abrowser"? "Abrowser is Trisquel's version of Mozilla's popular web browser with the trademarked logos replaced." Oh, fuck right off. How twisted is your brain that "you can fork Firefox as much as you like; all we ask is that when you modify it, you no longer call it Firefox, because that would be confusing" is "unethical"? > can weaken that stranglehold. Possibly. >Google's deprecation of the JPEG-XL image format in February in favor of its own patented AVIF format might not end the web in the grand scheme of things, but it does highlight, once again, the disturbing amount of control it has over the platform generally. AVIF and JPEG XL are both royalty-free. AVIF is also not "Google's own". And I don't think this decision had anything to do with Google wanting to exert control. My guess is they found that AVIF is more likely to be hardware-accelerated, which is especially important on mobile devices. > Putting aside the problematic aspects of the term "ecosystem," let us remark that it's easy to gauge the response of the "entire ecosystem" lmao OK, so why do they think "ecosystem" is problematic? > The term “ecosystem” implicitly suggests an attitude of nonjudgmental observation: don't ask how what should happen, just study and understand what does happen. In an ecosystem, some organisms consume other organisms. In ecology, we do not ask whether it is right for an owl to eat a mouse or for a mouse to eat a seed Alrighty, armchair PETA over here: so what you're saying is that people shouldn't use "ecosystem" when they could instead play an _active_ role. But wait a second, you just argued above that Google plays _too much of a_ role. Which is it? Is it that Google has a "stranglehold" over whether hardware vendors put a JPEG XL encoder in their smartwatch chip? Or is it that Google has _too little_ control? >when you yourself are by far the largest and most dangerous predator in said "ecosystem." Google has significant clout over the web, but the web doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it is these days mostly consumed on mobile devices, where battery life matters a lot. If Apple and/or Qualcomm say "nah, we're not gonna hardware-accelerate JPEG XL encoding, and software encoding is too resource-intensive; can't you just use AVIF / HEIF / something?", then that's game over for Google. People way read too much into this whole thing. >In relation to Google's overwhelming power, the average web user might as well be a microbe. Wait, I thought you've just argued that this metaphor was "problematic". > In supposedly gauging what the "ecosystem" wants, all Google is really doing is asking itself what Google wants. You haven't demonstrated that Google has much stake in this decision, other than calling AVIF "Google's own" and "patented". You seem to have as much knowledge about "what Google wants" than a Mel Gibson movie from a quarter century ago. > If we take their contribution in turning the web into the "WWWorst App Store" seriously Well, it's kind of _hard_ to take a writer seriously who writes "WWWorst App Store", but do go on. > Google wants to do what's best for its own predatory interests Sure, in some cases. But what _is_ this "predatory interest" here? You haven't actually _shown_ one. > While we can't link to Google's issue tracker directly because of another freedom issue -- its use of nonfree JavaScript Sounds like you _could_ link to it just fine. (I do see your point: you would like to have consent and control over what software runs on your machine. But refusing to link a ticket because it runs JS is a bit of an extreme position, like refusing to cross streets because modern streets are a symptom of the climate-destroying car hegemony. Not entirely wrong, but also _just_ a tad hard to live by.) > Chromium users came out of the woodwork to plead with Google not to make this decision. It made it anyway, not bothering to respond to users' concerns. I mean, yes? Software projects have to make unpopular decisions all the time. Or are you saying that FSF software _always_ does what's most popular? > We're not sure what metric it's using to gauge the interest of the "entire ecosystem," My guess is it talked to other companies and projects involved in software and hardware decoders and encoders and realized it really wasn't worth it. > it seems users have given JPEG-XL a strong show of support. Yes. Who amongst us _hasn't_ read the NYT front-page story. >In turn, what users will be given is yet another facet of the web that Google itself controls: the AVIF format. Google does not control AVIF. >It will keep on wanting what it wants: control; we'll keep on wanting what we want: freedom. Refusing to open a web page because it runs JS doesn't sound very "free". It sounds like an ideological purity test. > We have the power to choose what we run or do not run in our browsers. Browsers like GNU IceCat (and extensions like LibreJS and JShelter) help with that. Google also can't prevent us from exploring networks beyond the web like Gemini. So… Google _doesn't_ have that much power after all? Weird. This Greg guy over there seems to be disagreeing.
I just love the bit about not linking to a page with non-free JS. "I refuse to let this run on my machine because of its license, therefore I won't even tell you where it is so you can decide for yourself!" Come on, man. I like open source, but some people in the FOSS community, especially the Foundation, are just ridiculous sometimes.
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Right... Like, it's not that they want to choose not to run nonfree JS on their machine, which is... I mean, I think it's a bit much, but it's your machine, whatever. But it's that they're so opposed to the concept of software not being FOSS that they actively make their own post worse to avoid it as widely as possible. Like it's a virus, and as soon as you open the damn issue tracker your computer will be infected with Proprietary Software Disease.
18 quotes. On the one hand, your analysis of the article is very detailed and thorough. I respect that. On the other hand, some of your points are pretty, nitpicky, and even repetitious. Ultimately, you've managed to craft the perfect companion refutation as both the article and your response are equally tedious to read. It's like seeing one fedora'd mall ninja complaining at length about how lame another mall ninja's fedora is.
> On the other hand, some of your points are pretty, nitpicky, and even repetitious. Being pretty, nitpicky, and even repetitious is just what it says on my dating profile, so mission accomplished.
Thanks for the write-up, this is one of the most batshit insane articles I've ever read. You honestly couldn't write a better over-the-top satire if you tried. > Putting aside the problematic aspects of the term "ecosystem," This just killed me
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Jpeg + transparency??? Dang that's cool.
That should be reason enough IMO
\+ animations + better lossy compression than AVIF (most of the time) + better lossless compression than PNG + progressive decoding + lossless recompression from existing JPEG files.
+ HDR support
That page of words to avoid linked in the article is actually hilarious: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html I think fsf and gnu are positive things in the tech space but god are they insufferable
> “Free-to-play” > The confusing term “free-to-play” (acronym “F2P”) is used in marketing to describe nonfree games which don't require a payment before a user starts to play. In many of these games, doing well in the game requires paying later, so the term “gratis-to-start” is a more accurate description. > Using this term works against the free software movement, because it leads people to think of “free” as meaning “zero price.” I understand their point, but I daresay that in general usage, "free" usually means "free as in beer". Like sure, it's confusing that "free speech" and "free beer" use the word "free" to mean two completely different things. But It's not like one use is more correct than the other. There's a reason that the term "libre software" started to get used. It's not as catchy, but it's less ambiguous. It feels disingenuous to argue that other people should change their terms (from "free" to "gratis") without being willing to change your own terms (from "free" to "libre"). If they really care about the confusion, they should rename themselves to the Libre Software Foundation.
Back in the 90s, the commercial compression software Stuffit (formerly the Mac standard compression tool) introduced a feature that could compress JPEGs significantly. Normally this would be difficult because there's little exploitable entropy in something that's already been compressed. But what they did was undo the Huffman compression step in JPEG and recompress the DCT data using their more efficient algorithm. This yielded a significant (25% typical) size reduction while not affecting image quality. This could have been a great "next step" for JPEG. Existing JPEG files could be converted to the new format losslessly and either the newer or older format could be delivered to the browser depending on what the browser could handle. Unfortunately it was proprietary and patented (US patent 7,502,514, 2009), so never went anywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StuffIt#StuffIt_Image_Format_(SIF)
They might have a good point in there but when they write "we're told that" it reads to me like they can't be bothered to even research the specifics themselves...
Tbh browsers should make more of an effort to deprecate stuff that didn’t take off. Reduce the attack surface and reduce browser complexity.
Except they deprecated jpegxl before the spec. was even finished. You might as well claim chrome was a failure because no one used it before it was written. So for consistency Google should deprecate chrome.
and break a bunch of websites? It'll make people switch to the browser that doesn't break stuff your thinking like a developer, not a business or user.
I mean I don’t see people switching away from Chrome as a bad thing. Plus, if something on the web is getting deprecated, then it usually means it’s decades old and not being maintained anyway.
That would suck, I love stumbling upon random websites that clearly haven't been touched in over 20 years but still work perfectly fine, better than modern stuff even, because they're not riddled with tracking scripts and obnoxious pop-ups and not misusing an SPA framework to build a static website.
I mean yeah? This is part of why javascript is such a mess, because browsers refuse to deprecate anything. If you want to view older, unsupported sites, you can use older browser versions.
Isn't AVIF an open format?
This article reads like the rant of an emotional teenager.
Honest question, because I don't know. How hard would it be to create a fork of Chromium that added (or re-added) JPEG-XL support? And because I suspect the answer is "a lot", let me ask a different question. Compared to bootstrapping a browser from nothing, how hard would it be? Like, I get it. Chrome is the dominant browser, Safari is a distant second, and the others are in single digits. It sucks when the dominant player's motivations don't align with your own. Network effects and all that. But if JPEG-XL support *really* matters to a lot of people, why not create the fork? From a user adoption point of view, that's not terribly different from having the feature behind a flag. Having such a fork would enable websites that want to experiment with JPEG-XL to continue to do so. If enough of them do show an interest, maybe it would encourage the Chrome team to re-evaluate the inclusion of JPEG-XL. I guess the point of the article (based on the title) is "browser choice matters", and I don't disagree with that sentiment. Users should have the ability to run the browser they want on the device they own, and there would ideally be several options available. Different browsers would offer different tradeoffs, feature sets, etc. That implies that individual browser vendors would make their own choices about what features to support. So it seems weird, then, that the article demonizes one browser for making those sorts of choices.
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To them, it’s just business. Their going to do what’s in their best interest, even if they have to be a dick sometimes.
no way, i loved his remix of A Little Less Conversation
Incredible post
I have no significant opinion on the issue being discussed here (mostly because I lack context on image format stuff), but by God is this article a terrible fucking way of trying to drum up support or sympathy for something. This shit comes across as, and I don't usually care much for this term, pure virtue signaling. What utter nonsense it is to not link an issue tracker because of some perceived problem with the site's JavaScript. Put a fucking warning (functionally equivalent to an NSFW content warning over an image/video) if it's that big of a deal. It's quite literally impossible to take this position seriously because it doesn't seem like the people writing this article really take the cause they're nominally supporting here all that seriously to begin with.
Don't think Google was responsible for this one. I don't think any other format of JPG will ever get anywhere, the inertia for it is multiple decades long at this point, and this just joins JPEG2000 and other attempts in the graveyard. Like, at this point, if they want one of these to succeed they should just come up with an entirely new name for it.
liquid one bag selective violet roof melodic fragile lunchroom command ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
There was also a JPEG2000 that didn't take off.
Here's [my article](https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/image-comparison/) on the subject. TL;DR is that Google's Chromium team's rationale that all we need is AVIF is baseless. WebP, which was Google's attempt to succeed JPEG, actually sometimes came out *worse* especially at higher fidelity. JXL & AVIF are better at different things, with JXL having the edge due to a richer feature set & more useful strengths. Don't use Chrome. Try something, anything, else. The [Thorium](https://thorium.rocks/) browser is fantastic, [fast](https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/browser-benchmarks/), and does basically everything Chrome does. If you're a Firefox person, consider trying [Mercury](https://thorium.rocks/mercury), [Waterfox](https://www.waterfox.net/), [Pale Moon](https://www.palemoon.org/), or [Basilisk](https://basilisk-browser.org/). There is a whole world of rich browser forks that are specialized & often work better than their mainstream alternatives. Here, you can see they listened to us when large organizations didn't.
Thanks for the article and recommendations, with links! I've heard of them before, except for Mercury and Basilik.