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#jpeg#jxl#webp#support#image#avif#lossy#apple#better#lossless
Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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Also, I was under the impression that after backtracking, Chromium was relying on Mozilla to come up with a Rust port, but it seems it was the reverse. Good on Google Research.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/08/intent-to-ship-jpeg-xl/
> So, we laid down a challenge to the JPEG XL team at Google Research: Build a safe, performant, compact, and compatible JPEG XL decoder in Rust, and we’ll ship it. That challenge was met; Google Research built jxl-rs, and it’s the core of our JPEG XL support in Firefox.
jxl-rs started to outperform the C++ library 2 months ago.
JXL was dead. Apple is who brought it back to life, and the only reason Chrome resurrected JXL, and now Firefox followed their path, is because Apple pushed JXL support to a billion plus devices.
I know people like complaining about Apple, but there's a "read the room" kind of moment where people just seem to either not know the context or are just knee jerking.
Things apple do because apple do:
- make a mouse you can't use while charging it
- gets bored of the power inefficency L of x86, makes the fastest arm cpu that causes x86 manufacturers get serious about power
- hey, those f keys? what if useless strip
- decades ahead in panel tech and refuses to compromise
And Apple including support in their default graphics library so every iOS (and Mac) supported it. (I use Firefox, but let's not pretend like they'd move the market on JXL support.)
Also the compatibility with existing JPEG files that was mentioned below, unlike other formats you can losslessly convert a JPEG into a JXL without losing quality but saving file size in the process.
* it actually has better compression than PNG for this
* and potentially AVIF too, but this is debated
Does it do tiles? What about pyramids (i.e. precomputed downscaled images, think mipmaps)? Right now the state of the art for truly large images (medical, geospatial, scanned artworks) seems to be JPEG (and I think also JPEG 2000?) tiles in TIFF containers, which would be fine except nobody seems to agree on how exactly to express the pyramids.
Lossless webp is a completely different image format compared to lossy webp, even though they come under the same file extension. Unlike lossy webp, it's a good image format that has excellent compression ratio compared to png. I've often been using it for screenshots to avoid damaging text clarity and still maintain acceptable file size.
jxl has excellent support for both lossy and lossless cases, and can replace both lossy avif (even if somewhat less efficient at low file sizes), and lossless webp.
Note also that converting jpeg to jxl is 100% reversible, you can convert it back to exactly the same image (byte for byte identical) if you need to.
If browsers extended `srcset` with support for HTTP Range requests, we could use a progressive-encoded jpg (xl or not) file as the source for multiple detail levels.
A device with a small screen would request the first 10kb of the image, while one with a medium screen might fetch 40kb.
The big advantage of that - for sites with many images - is a much better cache hit-rate for a given CDN spend.
Additionally, if you've already fetched a small version of an image and then want to view a bigger version, you've already got partial content downloaded & can fetch only the rest of the file.
Also webp is IMO subjectively worse at the same file sizes than the other two. Dunno if there's any studies on it to back that up though. It also has a max image size that is plausibly a problem in some use cases (16k in one dimension) while AVIF is 65k per axis and JXL 1M per axis.
I chose webp for long term storage of scanned documents in our SaaS product, as size reduction was more important than no banding.
Also webp has excellent support in modern software and operating systems. So that's not a drawback any more. JpegXL will be the best of all worlds choice in a few years when software support is good.
jxl shines when you want to do anything even a little bit more complex. Support for lots more color formats, including fp ones. Support for an image with parts of it encoded losslessly, and parts with a lossy encoder. Great progressive decoding. And many more features.
Lossy: webp (VP8 I-frame format which means mandatory 4:2:0 chroma subsampling and ungodly smoothing) was never good, AVIF is better but only equal or worse at decent, visually transparent bitrates.
Another point worth mentioning: AV1/AVIF doesn't really have a standard encoder, libaom is a reference codec thus slow and not really interested in proper psy optimizations, SVT-AV1 is slowly getting there thanks to enthusiasts porting x264's good stuff to it but remains locked to 4:2:0 (lol). I won't even speak about the missed promises of FGS.
And finally, JXL's format has a lot of gizmos that make it more future proof as something to replace JPEG/PNG/GIF. Progressive decoding, lossless conversion from JPEG, very large limits (float bitdepth for HDR, image dimensions without tiling, unlimited channels incl. CMYK support) are good even when the encoder isn't yet supporting everything.