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JPEG XL: How It Started, How It’s Going
(cloudinary.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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I'll go back and add it - there's a lot of great stuff that I didn't mention just for brevity. The biggest royalty concern is HEIC atm, which is basically a nonstarter. I'm not sure how the licensing on the other free formats compares against JXL.
Make no mistake, it was a political killing. They didn't kill it because of perceived performance, they killed it ahead of their public benchmarks because of "lack of interest". Their cited lack of interest was determined after only a few months of the format going live behind opt-in experimental flags, and once they made their original decision, just about every large tech company spoke up in favor of JXL against Google's decision on their bugtracker, including Adobe, Intel, Nvidia, Facebook, Shopify, and Flickr. Google still plugged their ears and pretended no one was interested.
Google is trying to push WebP (2.0?) and AVIF, and using their browser marketshare to kill JXL and make that happen. Why they went through all this trouble to kill a format that they themselves co-developed, I really have no idea. I follow JXL relatively closely and I still am not 100% sure why they went through with this. All I know is that the decision was politically-motivated, and without applying political/ecosystem pressure they're not going to change their minds with data.
Edit: by the way, the last few comments still trickling in on that bugtracker are a great read, especially #406. #406 reads so similarly to my comment I'm surprised I didn't write it, haha.
I don't know about AVIF, but WebP is a Google format, and they might be doing it for control, like they use control of Chrome to push more advertising.
Google is also a member of the AOM, which created the AV1 format, which AVIF is derivative of - if you're wondering why they're pushing AVIF.
Avif is pushed because it's good and has hardware support across the board
What does google gains by making AVIF win rather than AVIF?
AVIF is derived from the AV1 video codec, which the AOM created, which Google is a part of. The data (basically every single metric), the community, and the websites all favor JXL, and yet Google is intentionally forcing the inferior WebP+AVIF pair against the tide. We can only speculate as to their true reasoning but the most likely answer is that they want their own formats to "win" the next standards race - what benefit that gives them besides ego I truly don't know.
But google also participated to the creation of JPEG-Xl.
And having "their" standard win does not make any sense to me to see where they benefit from it.
As I said earlier and have repeated:
If you've got a better guess please share. No one knows why they've done it except Google. The popular theory is that they're doing so to push WebP+AVIF instead, because it's one of few ideas that makes sense. We know their decision is political in some nature:
Making one or two of these mistakes before correcting them might be understandable, but making all of them and going radio silent when called out for them means they're doing this with a motive that is not data-driven or in good faith.