Programming

To be honest, no. I mainly know about JPEG XL only because I'm acutely aware of the limitations of standard JPEG for both photography and high resolution scanned documents, where noise and real world messiness cause all sorts of problems. Something like QOI seems ideal for synthetic images, which I don't work with a lot, and wouldn't know the limitations of PNG as well.

QOI is just a format that's easy for a programmer to get their head around.

It's not designed for everyday use and hardware optimization like jpeg-xl is.

You're most likely to see QOI in homebrewed game engines.

This is why I fucking love the internet.

I mean, I'll never take the time to get this knowledgable about image formats, but I am ABSOLUTELY fuckdamn thrilled that at least SOMEONE out there takes it seriously.

Good on you, pixel king

• The format works for both lossy and lossless compression, depending on the use case and need. Photographs can be encoded in a lossy way much more efficiently than JPEG and things like screenshots can be losslessly encoded more efficiently than PNG.

Someone made a fair point that having a format being both lossy and lossless is not necessarily a great idea. If you download a jpeg file you know it will be compressed, if you download png it will be lossless. Shifting through jxl files to check if it's lossy or not doesn't sound very fun.

All in all I'm a big supporter of jxl though, it's one of the only github repos I actively follow.

Existing JPEG files (which are the vast, vast majority of images currently on the web and in people’s own libraries/catalogs) can be losslessly compressed even further with zero loss of quality. This alone means that there’s benefits to adoption, if nothing else for archival and serving old stuff.

Funny thing is, there was talk on the Chrome bug tracker of using just this ability transparently at the HTTP layer (like gzip/brotli compression), but they're so set on pushing their AVIF format that they backed away from it.

I'm under the impression that there's two reasons we don't have it in chromium yet:

1. Google initially ignored jpeg-xl but then everyone jumped on it and now they feel they have to create a post-hoc justification for not supporting it earlier which is tricky and now they have a sunk cost situation to keep ignoring it
2. Google today was burnt by the webp vulnerability which happened because there was only one decoder library and now they're waiting for more jpeg-xl libraries which have optimizations (which rules out reference implementations), good support (which rules out libraries by single authors), have proven battle-hardening (which will only happen over time) and are written safely to avoid another webp style vulnerability.

Google already wrote the wuffs language which is specifically designed to handle formats in a fast and safe way but it looks like it only has one dedicated maintainer which means it's still stuck on a bus factor of 1.

Honestly, Google or Microsoft should just make a team to work on a jpg-xl library in wuffs while adobe should make a team to work on a jpg-xl library in rust/zig.

That way everyone will be happy, we will have two solid implementations, and they'll both be made focussing on their own features/extensions first so we'll all have a choice among libraries for different needs (e.g. browser lib focusing on fast decode, creative suite lib for optimised encode).