Support JPEG XL

[chi]

I think it's a great opportunity for Firefox to stand out by supporting JPEG XL before any other browser.

Imagine images served by Cloudflare and Cloudinary load faster and look better only with Firefox. Firefox was a pioneer of web technologies and it should win the title back, if Firefox just keep following Chrome without any differentiation, why would people choose Firefox?

If the decoder memory safety is a concern, maybe Mozilla can start a crowd funding campaign to sponsor a Rust decoder, even the campaign itself will attract reports and attentions for Firefox.

Mozilla argued AVIF was already supported as a same generation but clearly JPEG XL has many advantages:

• Much better encoding performance (AVIF is not suitable for realtime CDN optimization at all)
• lossless and better high fidelity (video codec based image format)
• HDR (there will be a billion of mobile devices with real good & bright screen in just a few years)
• Little generation loss (important for web)

Supports from Facebook, Adobe (they're adding export support), Intel and VESA, Krita, The Guardian, libvips, Cloudinary, Shopify

[Killercat103]

I literally made an account to vote for this. Google should not be allowed to change the standard in their favor of WEBP and AVIF for more personal control. This format is the best i know and I would instantly use this in personal web development if this gets stabilized. If not i still might do it. image.jxl.enabled stays on

[higgs]

This needs more attention in my opinion. Stupid to allow Google to bully the internet into using "their" format instead of the actual better option

[Daseinn]

Any potential updates about this getting enabled by default? 👀 

Like even enabled by default in beta builds first and then the final builds after. 

[Dasein]

Yes, Please! 🙏🏼 JPEG-XL has benefits from many other formats (and advantages over WebP/AVIF) including animation & lossless option, Filesizes can be scaled up and down according to use-case,

and it has an all-in-one approach that's backwards compatible with legacy formats, surely Firefox would seize this opportunity to show why other companies should seriously move towards more open-standards.

Also why they should consider moving away from their locked-down proprietary ones that they get an advantage in pushing due to their market position? I believe that this format would be in-line with Mozilla's stance on browsers in general and offers the users choice. 

[Linux_in_a_Bit]

We need this so badly. Internet speeds have grown so much but average page loading times have remained almost exactly the same as the early 2000s. You know what would help? Smaller files and more optimized formats!

People in developing nations, those in remote areas, moble users, and desktop users alike will thank you if this is implemented. Please do it 🙏

[toastal]

As a web developer and photographer, I would love to see Mozilla reconsider from neutrality to strongly support.

[Archprogrammer]

+1

From an authoring perspective JPEG XL makes much more sense and it's important to see the benefits from a broader perspective than just last-mile content delivery to the browser (even if progressive decoding is a major benefit even there).

[ffix]

Second* browser to support. Palemoon, a fork of Firefox, already supports jpeg xl. Could be a good bandwagon to jump on.

[JonSneyers]

Besides Pale Moon, also Basilisk and Waterfox (two other Firefox forks) and Thorium (a Chromium fork) have added support (enabled by default) for JPEG XL.

[FoxtrotCZ]

JPEG XL whitepaper 2.0
https://ds.jpeg.org/whitepapers/jpeg-xl-whitepaper.pdf

[Saarsk]

Supporting JPEG XL is actually really important in terms of fairness, openness and maintaining healthy competition and options.

Google, who is the founder of a certain competing standard decided to drop support despite a large number of the biggest tech companies protesting it and asking for this to be enabled instead of removed.

Even Google's own employees seemed to be confused. No official word other than the most vague and avoidant statement followed by silence.

The fact is that it was probably the most feature-rich and promising new image formats, including for web-use. Party due to feature-completeness and compression efficiency but also backwards compatiblity with lossless re-compression and re-encoding of old JPEGs.

It made no sense for Google to kill it (or you can put two and two together and figure out their motives). Even more sad is that a large part of the rest of the industry seem to just let Google mis-use their monopoly position and competitive motives to decide the faith of an open standard before it even got the chance to live.

I does make a difference if FireFox supports it. Google already had no valid reasons (they barely bothered to try to come up with anything remotely convincing). All we need is for the project to continue being developed and the industry ought to facepalm at Google's decision and ask for the support to be re-introduced.

When they basically own the browser technology they are too big to be able to kill off a competitor like that. Google is Goliath.

[EvenBoe]

Just heard about this JPEG XL format, sounds awesome!! 😀

[xUxSxExR]

Palemoon already integrates JXL so it is totally possible.

[Aerocatia]

Please support JPEG-XL. It is the only format that can be called a direct replacement to JPEG and PNG, since those formats can be losslessly converted to JPEG-XL with no quality loss and good size reduction across the board.

AVIF does not provide this functionality, using the lossy mode will incur quality loss and the lossless mode can sometimes perform worse than PNG.

Sticking with AVIF alone as the new image format means the vast quantity of existing PNG and JPEG content will have no direct upgrade path.

[jonor]

Being a software developer myself, I understand that supporting a new format is not taken lightly. There is the overhead cost for maintenance as you need to pull in security updates and bug fixes within libjxl. There's also the question if yet another format will obsolute this one in the near future.

However, I think JPEG XL is one of those "once in a decade" formats or longer. I can honestly not see JPEG XL being made obsolete in the foreseeable future as it is so advanced and encompassing both lossless and lossy compression alike at very high ratios, as well as animation.

Many focus on the compression ratio alone, but JPEG XL makes several important advances beyond those of competing formats such as JPEG, PNG, AVIF to make it a great "catch-all" format that many of us have been missing on the modern web.

That Google has chosen to currently not support JPEG XL shouldn't impact an independent evaluation by Mozilla, as an independent browser with indedendent goals.

JPEG XL, being an open, highly flexible format with performance to match the decade ahead should logically warrant much greater efforts than what have been seen from the community so far. It is such an important format, that even despite lacking web browser support, we see it becoming adopted in the industry, such as by Adobe Camera Raw, Darkroom, Affinity Photo, GIMP, Krita, as well as KDE and GNOME photo viewers, and within Windows Explorer and more as a WIC extension. This eager adoption is indicative of how much this image format is as a stepping stone from inferior or less flexible formats such as JPEG, PNG, WebP and AVIF.