if i make an image then upload it to the internet - the only software that's involved is on my side (gimp, ps, whatever[^1]) and the browser of the person viewing it.

It's not. The web site you're uploading to has to support it to allow you the upload in the first place, and to process it to make previews or lower-res versions for the web pages or apps.

Well unless you're uploading directly through ftp and share only the link, but again that's not how people use pictures.

Then if the person on the other side wants to download the picture, set it as wallpaper, send it through messenger, then those programs need to support it too.

Heck now that I think about it, browser support isn't even that critical because web sites can make media available in whatever format the browser supports. The important part is the backend, and local apps.

meh, i haven't seen any in the past ~5 years apart from ones specifically chosen for that 256 colour æsthetic; but i will believe you

Do believe me, recently I've started converting those I want to keep to mp4 and I'm saving gigabytes.

Recently I've had some debates here with people looking for better support for gifs, or how to encode them better or whatever, and I nudge them towards webp at least. Because simply, if the web site supports only jpg, png, gif and webp uploads, then I definitely prefer webp.

it did get places. it has got places. again, it's very new and is already well supported

It's not all that well supported in lots of those cases I mention. And where it did get, it only got because Apple has actually billions of devices out there and has the power to make the format default among them with one worldwide update. Yet it still has to convert to jpg when sharing elsewhere by default. That's how huge the resistance is.

It's not all that new either, heif was introduced in 2017, webp even earlier and people still bitch that they can't use it because their oddball app doesn't support it.

Meanwhile x265 has been a common thing for years, and every few years before there's been a new generation of video codec, and nobody ever bats an eye when there's a new update.

jpeg2k failed because of licencing and royalty issues. heif hasn't spread because of licencing and royalty issues

I'm not advocating for these formats specifically (definitely not jpeg2000 haha), but I'm saying licences and royalties aren't that super important when it comes to how supported something becomes.

Hell look at Apple... Everything is proprietary.

Or when it comes to formats, mp3 is still the most widely supported audio format (non-free), and DivX has been the most widely supported video format for much longer than anything else... Also non-free.

jpe group have a considerable amount of sway so i'm sure they could persuade most camera manufacturers to support it

Haha hardware camera makers are the slowest dinosaurs when it comes to technology. Took them fucking ages for some to support DNG raw format, and before h264 was already getting grey, most would record videos only in mjpeg.

But it's more about phone cameras anyway. And well with those we'll only have webp and heif at most, so I guess we have to deal with that anyway.

Maybe if Mozilla had not abandoned their FF OS, maybe that would've been a camera supporting jpegxl now.