Here comes a new JPEG challenger

I remember being a big fan of FLIF when it came out. I remember it had come out of nowhere to steal PNG's crown, and then the author suddenly disappeared before finishing it. I soon learned they had been picked up by a company to work on a successor named FUIF and then some time after that FUIF was merged into JPEG XL.

Because of this, I was really excited when JPEG XL came out. An obscure but brilliant format had essentially been merged into the successor to JPEG, and I thought it was really going to take off. It had support from many major tech companies including Google. Browsers quickly started adding experimental support and then... nothing.

Soon after JPEG XL was finalised, AVIF was too, and AVIF was essentially Google's attempt at making a successor to WebP, by using much the same technology as AV1. So the question was, which one to support? Google made a comparison between image formats, focusing almost exclusively on lossy compression ratios (which I think isn't entirely fair, considering they both have a lossless mode to compete with PNG) and AVIF won. So they dropped JPEG XL from Chromium, claiming lack of interest or something (which was wild, I'd never heard of a faster uptake of an image format). Soon after, Firefox was talking about removing it too, but ended up deciding to wait and see.

Things looked bleak until Apple picked it up, and then things have just stalled since. I'm happy there's still interest in JPEG XL, its FLIF/FUIF derived lossless encoding produces smaller files than both AVIF's lossless encoding and PNG, while having features neither could dream of.

Jxl is very cool :3

jxl gang rise up
- It also has the coolest abreviation/name out of most image formats.
  .jxl sounds a lot nicer than web-pee or avif.
  Also Junkie XL made that famous remix of Elvis' "A Little Less Conversation" which is a banger.
Junkie XL?
- Jixel
- Saturday teenage kick

Everyone: "Stop using stuff made by Google that they make with intent of owning the web!"

Also everyone: "Don't you understand why WEBP is the best format??"

Idk Google for sure does a lot of that but do open image standards give them any control?
- Google literally has a long history of promoting open formats to eventually close those open formats and make them less open.
  GoogleTalk originally supported XMPP and then XMPP support was dropped when they changed it to "Google Hangouts."
  Android was originally open source and still largely is, but now they're not publishing the device information for Pixel devices, putting actually open operating systems like LineageOS and GraphiteOS in the position of having to reverse engineer drivers to be able to move forward.
  Chrome was originally a lot more open as well, but as Google gained market share dominance with their web browser, they made it slowly more and more closed off with only Chromium being really open, and they also used that market position to start to push their own solutions as web standards (what they've done with WEBP, actually) instead of having community input from the W3C.
I'm not aware of a competing format to WEBP with better features and similar compression ratios.
That's not the case for JPEG XL vs AVIF and Google absolutely deserves the hate for pushing AVIF.

But they were, all of them, deceived

For another format was made.

One format to rule them all, One format to find them, One format to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them; In the Land of the Bay Area where the shadows lie.
From what I've read, AVIF doesn't outperform JXL on any metric except browser support
- Well Google said otherwise when they removed support for it: https://storage.googleapis.com/avif-comparison/index.html
  However I'm not sure how trustworty their own statistic is.
  On the other hand Mozilla's PoV:
  neutral - JPEG-XL includes features and performance that might differentiate it from other formats, but the benefits it provides are not significant enough on their own to justify the cost of adding another C++ image decoder to browsers. A memory-safe decoder would reduce these costs considerably, and we are open to shipping one that meets our requirements.
  https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
  So AV1 is clearly the winner here, also because it can be used for videos and not just images.

What the HEIC!?

Jon Sneyers, one of the developers of FLIF, since combined it with ideas from various lossy compression formats to create a successor called the Free Universal Image Format (FUIF), which itself was combined with Google's PIK format to create JPEG XL. As a consequence, FLIF is no longer being developed.[1]

The format was initially announced publicly in September 2015,[6] with the first alpha release occurring about a month later, in October 2015.[2] The first stable version of FLIF was released in September 2016.[7]

So, not new and seemingly no longer developed separately from JXL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QOI_(image_format) seems interesting, though.

Qoi is good for some situations cause of its simplicity, but it's not really the "best" at anything
- iirc the main reason for QOI was to have a simple format because "complexity is slow", so by stripping things that the author didn't consider important the idea was the resulting image format would be quicker and smaller than something like PNG or WebP.
  Not sure how well that held up in practice, a lot of that complexity is actually necessary for a lot of use cases (e.g. you need colour profiles unless you're only ever dealing with sRGB), and I remember a bunch of low hanging fruit optimisations for PNG encoders at the time that improved encoding speed by quite a bit.

GIF:

The rar of media formats. Keeper of low colorspace.

I really like WebP. It has a super annoying issue though: Animated WebP can't take advantage of hardware acceleration.

And the real problem there is that WebM doesn't support looping. So if you want an auto playing, looping gif-like video you have to use WebP and thus, give up on hardware acceleration.

that WebM doesn't support looping
Isn't that a player issue?
Edit: i assume there is a metadata flag, in formats that support it? Or is it something different?
- No, actually! There's no metadata option in .WebM to tell it to loop! It's not in the spec (which is just a subset of matroska).
  The format literally does not support looping. Whereas the .WebP spec does provide a looping option:
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9649/
  It's in the ANIM chunk which specifies the "loop count". If it's zero, loop forever.
  WebM has no built-in loop flag 🤷

i'm bmp and tiff ride or die.

So completely uncompressed images on the web. Totally great idea.
- Maybe if web pages weren't also loading like 25mb of javascript it wouldn't be such a big deal to load 5mb of uncompressed images.
BMP doesn't even fit in the open media formats category. It's merely a promise by MS not to not assert it's patents. Fuck it.
🫨
FITS all the way.
Fuck .bmp would be hilarious to get working (as part of a website) as a web developer.

Thanks for the info about FLIF. I remember reading about it before; let's hope it takes off like FLAC.

My dumb ass found out that FLIF "became" JXL after posting. So...
- Oh, it's right at the top of their site. Brainfart.
  My computer supports JXL, read and write. Is JXL lossless?

I converted my entire photo archive to WebP. No regrets.

Compression algorithms are magic. Especially lossless compression.

Interestingly they don't compare based on encoding or decoding speed on flif.info. So I assume it's slow or inefficient to decode. Even though that should not be the case for arithmetic coding. Maybe they also just didn't care? But I'd think on mobile devices the power required for decoding would matter... I'm confused.

.mng to the rescue!