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

[_wojtek]

One more vote for support for the format. It ticks all the boxes, has superb features and virtually the only thing holding it back is the SomeCompanyWithDubiousMotives... really, we shouldn't be hold back by google!

[so2]

A lot of good points have been brought up already, but I'd like to reiterate the future proofing aspect.

JXL was designed with future usecases in mind. The bitstream already supports features that the current libjxl encoder barely explores if at all. This means that next to the great performance it can provide today, it also still has optimizations possible for years to come.

AVIF on the other hand is more limited by its AV1 origins even today. And with changes like https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif/pull/1361 it appears to be a moving target that will require more work continually put into it in the long run than the ISO specified JXL.

[Existencielle]

Hello, I'm here to ask when will it finally come to Stable? I had assumed by now it would work, never bothered to check it, but as I tried today, even with the img.jxl.enabled setting set to true, my browser won't display any JPEG XL images.

How can that be? It has been almost 2 years sind this was introduced in Nightly. I do not want to use Nightly, i like to be on the safe side. But seeing how often new updates come out for Firefox, I assumed it would not take long at all until this feature (which by all accounts I have read already works flawlessly) will come to Stable as well. But 2 years, who knows how many versions come and gone, and still nothing?

Can you please explain what is going on?

[arun54321]

Why is the Mozilla Firefox still silent on this matter?

Why don't they listen to its users? What is the use of this forum?

[VcSaJen]

Firefox Nightly have initial implementation of JPEG XL support behind a flag, but further patches that improve support in Firefox Nightly were never merged. Are there any intent of merging them so that Firefox Nightly would have full support, and not just base support?

[Anonymous]

Since Safari now has JpegXL .... maybe firefox should consider adding it now too?

ref. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10122/

[foxtrotdragon]

"We <Insert media here> recommend Firefox as it act's as a counter balance to chrome and prevent's a chrome monopoly from dictating the path of the internet"

Im sorry did all of those media mean safari?

[War1971]

Yeah. Just add support for JPEG XL. I've been hearing everywhere about this format.

[JRepin]

Free Software Foundation gives an extremely good reason why we need to support this in free software community, which Firefox/Mozilla are part of: Google's decision to deprecate JPEG-XL emphasizes the need for browser choice and free formats

Mozilla and Firefox should be on the side of people and fighting for free and open internet not taken hostage by big tech/GAFAM corporations. It is their original goal and they should not forget it.

[Jon]

Thanks all for your ideas and feedback here, including the recent activity since Apple's announcement that Safari will support JPEG XL. We are planning to take another look at this and will update the thread if anything changes.

[conrad]

Glad to hear it @Jon.  Some further suggested reading (the first one is a very high-level overview of its performance/features/current support and the second two go into more detail):

https://jpegxl.info/why-jxl.html 

https://jpegxl.io/articles/faq/

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

Feels like a no-brainer at this point considering:

1. How good the JXL encoder/decoder is at compression, single-core speeds, and parallelization (even the AVIF blog admits as such, saying "JPEG XL is faster across the board with single-core encode and decode speeds and is more parallelizable than AVIF" at https://avif.io/blog/comparisons/avif-vs-jpegxl/)
2. How rich and extendable/futureproof the JXL featureset is (progressive decode, lossless reversible JPEG -> JXL conversions for ~20% savings, overlays/layers, depth maps, 32 max bit depth, extremely high max resolution limits, 4099 additional channels, CMYK support, the strongest generation loss resilience, transparency, animation, lossless and lossy mode, all with a minimal header size of 12 bytes).
3. How much work has already been done in Firefox (which has been leveraged and expanded on so that Waterfox and Pale Moon both have JXL support now)
4. How much industry support there is in terms of non-browser software (Apple is adding support throughout all of iOS 17 and macOS 14 by the way, not just Safari) and how many big companies seem to be backing it in one form or another (Apple, Adobe, Intel, Facebook, Cloudinary, Shopify, Flickr, etc.).

[JyrkiAlakuijala]

Feel free to reach out for more info and to discuss the potential, performance, features, maintenance, security and other topics directly with the JPEG XL development team. For example, we can take over the integration work if you don't have engineers available for this right now.

[Daseinn]

A lot of people in the community calling for this, and it has benefits for industries such as medical imaging. Surely supporting it by default in a beta build or something would allow the people to have their say? 

[Daseinn]

It's good that Mozilla is reconsidering this for their products, thank you. 

[uriesk]

@Jonit has been 6 weeks, is there any update?