Google is deprecating JPEG-XL for its own predatory interests, FSF states

[Alfonso Maruccia]

What just happened? Google decided to deprecate support for the experimental JPEG-XL image format, and Free Software Foundation is now accusing the corporation of being a predatory monopolist which has no interest in what's really best for the web.

JPEG-XL is a recent image format optimized for responsive web environments, a potential new standard designed to transition the web from the legacy (yet still extremely popular) JPEG format while being based on the open source PIK technology. JPEG-XL/PIK can reduce storage cost while offering higher quality and a larger feature set, but the decision made by Google could very well become a death sentence for the format.

In a comment on the Chromium project posted in 2022, a Google engineer said the developers decided to remove the JPEG-XL experimental code from the open source browser framework. The "ecosystem" didn't have enough interest for the format, the developer said, while the format itself "does not bring sufficient incremental benefits" over existing formats. Therefore, removing the JPEG-XL code and flag would reduce the overall maintenance burden of the Chromium project.

As highlighted by Greg Farough, campaigns manager at the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Chromium is the dominant force behind the modern web powering around 80 percent of worldwide browser usage with Chrome and Chromium-based, third party browsers like Edge, Opera and Vivaldi. "In supposedly gauging what the ecosystem wants," Farough said, Google is just asking itself "what Google wants."

Once again, FSF said, Google is doing what is best "for its own predatory interests," not what's best for the web. After Mountain View decided to deprecate the JPEG-XL code in Chromium, developers made the issue the most "starred" one in the history of the project. Despite what Google said, the "ecosystem" is seemingly very interested in JPEG-XL support and was asking the advertising corporation not to do what it did anyway.

Google is trying to control every aspect of the web to always benefit its own business interests, FSF suggested. For this very reason, in place of JPEG-XL the corporation decided to support the AVIF format. AVIF, or AV1 Image File Format, is an open source, royalty-free specification which uses the same compression algorithm of the AV1 video format to store images or image sequences.

AVIF is yet another facet of the "web that Google itself controls," FSF said, because the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) and its members (Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta) are under investigation by the European Union for the AV1 hidden licensing terms. What Google really wants is control over the web, FSF said, while users and independent developers really want "freedom."

As for the JPEG-XL image format, Google's decision to remove the technology from Chromium will likely have significant effects on the future development of the technology. Mozilla Firefox, the only alternative browser technology currently competing with Chromium's monopoly, has taken a neutral stance on JPEG-XL. The format doesn't seem to offer substantial improvements over the competition, the developers said, but Firefox could support it "if usage becomes more widespread."

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/98355-google-deprecating-jpeg-xl-own-predatory-interests-fsf.html

 

[DSirius]

Interesting how these corporations, make their business decisions and choose to justify them by a web of lies.
Google seems like taking the lead. How foolish to think that your own govern and citizens, and in general the rest of the world, are so stupid to believe your blatant lies.

 

[psycros]

Interesting how these corporations, make their business decisions and choose to justify them by a web of lies.
Google seems like taking the lead. How foolish to think that your own govern and citizens, and in general the rest of the world, are so stupid to believe your blatant lies.

What's sad is that it doesn't matter if everyone sees the truth. People are so lazy and willfully ignorant now that the power of the oligarchs is insurmountable, and by allying themselves with the ruling elite to push a political agenda, the scions of Big Tech are untouchable.

 

[RudyBob]

Sounds like something the president of Anheuser Busch would write..."ecosystem" Ha Ha

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

Disagree with the FSF here. No one else is sponsoring this technology. As a matter of fact it was partially authored by Google, and has been complete without movement for quite some time. Microsoft and Apple do not support this technology, and the only large companies that have had any involvement said they would support it but not much else (maybe they had a few employees put something together in the way of a proof of concept like Adobe). Here is the list of software with actual support on Wikipedia. They all either are products that try to support as many formats as possible, are very open-source friendly, or I've never heard of them. It doesn't represent a burgeoning standard.

• Squoosh – In-browser image converter
• Adobe Camera Raw – Adobe Photoshop's import/export for digital camera images
• Affinity Photo – raster graphics editor
• Chasys Draw IES – raster graphics editor
• Darktable – raw photo management application
• ExifTool – metadata editor
• FFmpeg – multimedia framework, via libjxl
• GIMP – raster graphics editor
• gThumb – image viewer and photo management application for Linux
• ImageMagick – toolkit for raster graphics processing
• XnView MP – viewer and editor of raster graphics
• JPEGView fork – viewer and editor of raster graphics.
• Ksnip – screen capture utility.
• IrfanView – image viewer and editor for Windows
• KaOS – Linux distribution
• Krita – raster graphics editor
• libvips – image processing library
• vipsdisp – high-performance ultra-high-resolution image viewer for Linux
• Qt and KDE apps – via KImageFormats
• Pale Moon – web browser

 

[bviktor]

Can someone please give me ONE reason why I should care? There's already WebP, and there's also AVIF. Both royalty free.

AVIF devs find AVIF better:

https://storage.googleapis.com/avif-comparison/index.html

JPEG XL devs find JPEG XL better (shocker):

https://cloudinary.com/blog/the-case-for-jpeg-xl

So... cry me a river. It's really not the killer format. It's somewhat better, in some aspects. It's somewhat worse in others. So... who cares. Feel free to come up with your own formats, but that by no means mandates anyone to implement it in their stack.

It's the same whinefest as with the removal of MNG support in Firefox. I guess Mozilla is also an evil corporation in FSF's book.

But really, did anyone care? Has anyone ever noticed its absense ever since? NOPE. Life goes on. Formats come and go.

 

[Puiu]

I don't care or want to use JPEG-XL, but adding support for it should be easy. I don't see how it is considered "a burden" for the Chromium devs.

 

[jimmy12]

Can someone please give me ONE reason why I should care? There's already WebP, and there's also AVIF. Both royalty free.

AVIF devs find AVIF better:

https://storage.googleapis.com/avif-comparison/index.html

JPEG XL devs find JPEG XL better (shocker):

https://cloudinary.com/blog/the-case-for-jpeg-xl

So... cry me a river. It's really not the killer format. It's somewhat better, in some aspects. It's somewhat worse in others. So... who cares. Feel free to come up with your own formats, but that by no means mandates anyone to implement it in their stack.

It's the same whinefest as with the removal of MNG support in Firefox. I guess Mozilla is also an evil corporation in FSF's book.

But really, did anyone care? Has anyone ever noticed its absense ever since? NOPE. Life goes on. Formats come and go.

Jpeg-XL is better. I've tested both myself and my only bias is to whatever is the best tech. Death by politics is dumb as hell and should be pushed back on especially when the format definitely has merit.

AVIF's main benefit is that it's really a video codec so is clearly good at animations. Secondarily it can leverage hardware acceleration of AV1 that will eventually be everywhere.

JXL's main benefits for me is that it does lossless very well, and can losslessly recompress jpeg to be smaller with no quality loss. The second point makes JXL particularly suited for the web, it makes the transitional phase much less painful. It's also not something that other formats have. The normal lossy mode is also competitive, so to me it covers all bases well except animation, which I believe it still covers but obviously AV1 is more suitable.

It is a killer format for the web if the gatekeepers let it.

 

[GoldenGoat]

When you have monopoly power over the web like Chrome does and IE did, you can set the de facto standards and standards bodies are irrelevant. Unless governments want to step in.

 

[Athlonite]

I don't think I've ever come across a site that uses JXL for it's images instead of Jpeg or PNG so no real big loss. I use vivaldi though and they've never supported it other than in experimental form and even then you had to troll through it's flags to set it to on to even get that much in the way of support.

 

[jimmy12]

Of course you haven't, it's a very recent standard. What's needed is a few big boys to get on board and add JXL as one of the options to get the ball rolling. The browser queries available formats or tells the server what formats it can handle, the server serves the best option. Alternatively provide a js polyfill, but that's slower than native support and far from ideal. It's no different for AVIF or any other format that isn't supported everywhere. Except it is different as google is playing favorites by dropping/delaying support, they are applying a chilling factor to JXL adoption because reasons.