In a more serious manner, JXL has features that both WebP and AVIF don't. Lossless images simply compress better with JXL than WebP (and if you in these circles you know to not bother with AVIF's lossless mode - even PNG beats AVIF in that arena). I know Google uses near-lossless images for their icons, but near-lossless wouldn't cut when it comes for medical diagnostics or meteorological uses. It has progressive loading, which WebP and AVIF don't really have. Speaking of near-lossless, WebP don't support 4:4:4 chroma subsampling while AVIF technically does but no encoder AFAIK focuses on it. Also, WebP only allows 16,384 pixels per side and AVIF only allows 65,536 pixels per side (which to be fair is the same as the original JPEG), while JXL allows 1,073,741,824 pixels per side (which is ludicrous, but considering that JPEG's 65,536 pixels per side was ludicrous at the time is good for future-proofing).
That's rewriting history a bit. There was a long gap between 1997 when png was added and when people started to really use it. A lot of it due to issues with transparency in internet explorer.
But yes, if you in 1996 said you were moving your entire business to png, i would similarly think that is an odd move.
More generally moving your business to something that doesn't exist yet is usually pretty dangerous. Moving your business to something that both doesn't exist and that nobody has promised to for sure implement seems downright risky.
We've evaluated AVIF and JPEG XL, with JXL coming out on top.
As others (Shopify for example) has mentioned, JPEG XL has some advantages (quick decoding, lossless conversion from JPEG, progressive decoding).
My point was that Google says there is "no demand", and we (as an example) have planned moving to a new image format, with JPEG XL as the front-runner. Them saying there is "no demand" is just because there isn't a browser yet that supports the format.
But as soon as there is one, we (and many others) could pull the trigger and suddenly there would be a lot of demand and usage (since other browsers can still be served with other image formats).
I would love to see blog post on it. ( Or against it even, we just need good discussions ) But as far as I am know, regardless of politics or ideology, JPEG XL is technically superior to AVIF. And its current reference implementation, isn't even tuned for the best case in many scenarios.
And yet here we are. There are no-demand for it.
Since that it seems that you're okay with lossy images, have you've tried RDOPNG (https://github.com/richgel999/rdopng)? It won't be as great as JPEG or JXL but it should eke out better-compressed images.
No direct web browser support is the only big downside :(
- Technically a compelling format.
- Parallel decoding.
- Progressive decoding (no need for 'placeholder images').
- Lossless better than PNG and lossy better than JPG.
- Better than AVIF in the 'high quality' end of the spectrum.
- Lossless recompression of JPEG into JXL.
- Fast enough for on-the-fly conversion to JPEG for backwards compatibility.
People from Facebook, Shopify, Adobe, Intel and other huge companies have also voiced their support and said it's on various internal roadmaps.
I hope this decision gets reverted. Seems like a huge mistake!