As it currently stands there should be over a billion devices that natively support JPEG-XL, as it was introduced in all Apple OSs since September 2023[1].
On the web alone it should be close to a billion users with support for JXL due to Safari’s market share.
It's also supported in Windows, GNOME, KDE, pretty much all image editors/viewers, and pretty much every other relevant program except for chromium based browsers.
JXL is still alive and well, it's just taking time to reach the prime time.
- Mac OS, iOS, and Safari support JPEG-XL
- Windows has first party JPEG-XL support as of this year (admittedly it's opt in rather than default)
- Essentially every major image processing app, editor, or drawing app supports JPEG-XL
- Firefox has preliminary support for JPEG-XL gated behind a feature flag and the nightly release.
- The JPEG-XL team is writing a direct port of the reference libjxl library into rust[1]. There already exists a third party rust port by some of the mainline contributors and it has ironed out a lot of the issues with the porting process prior to this mainline port. This first party rust port is intended to be gradually brought up to a hardened, production ready state.
- Mozilla has stated they have no objections to fully adopting JPEG-XL in Firefox once the rust port is production ready [2].
The last major barriers other than getting the rust code production ready will be chrome and android's first party support/adoption.
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TLDR: JPEG-XL is very much not dead and instead people are nose down working hard to continue pushing its adoption forward.
> To address this concern, the team at Google has agreed to apply their subject matter expertise to build a safe, performant, compact, and compatible JPEG-XL decoder in Rust, and integrate this decoder into Firefox.
I was not aware of this. Also judging by this and the sibling comments, it looks like the momentum didn't die despite Google's apathy. Hopefully the fact that their own team is now developing the rust port, as well as the growing support in other platforms, is enough to make Google reconsider its choices.
It wasn't killed off. Support was removed from Chrome, for what appears to be rather spurious reasons, but practically everyone else are busy implementing it.
I use JPEG XL / JXL all of the time, the fact it was "killed off" is news to me. I also use Firefox and not Chrome, so maybe that has something to do with it. If Google decides they want to divide the web by being stupid and failing to follow standards, we have very little path to change that, but it certainly does not create any form of consensus or resolute outcome. Google removing JPEG XL from Chrome because they want to force everyone to use a much worse standard they control (webp) doesn't mean anything about the future of JPEG XL.
It wasn't "killed", it was always disabled by default in Chrome, and removed for really quite reasonable reasons: literally every other image decoder has had serious vulnerabilities. Enabling it by default would expose a gigantic attack surface that almost certainly will be exploited sooner or later.
This is also why Firefox doesn't support it by default (IIRC it doesn't even link against libjpegxl by default in release builds – only nightly ones).
There is nothing preventing the Chrome or Firefox people from revisiting all of this in the future.
It seems to me the Rust implementation of JPEG XL is by far the best path forward for broad JPEG XL support in Firefox, Chrome, and other browsers. While Rust is of course not a complete guarantee there will never be any security issues, it does eliminate virtually all of the major exploits that have targeted image decoders in the past. Both Firefox and Chrome have expressed interest in this.
MrAlex94|7 months ago
On the web alone it should be close to a billion users with support for JXL due to Safari’s market share.
[1]: https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-how-it-started-how-its-g...
ndriscoll|7 months ago
OneDeuxTriSeiGo|7 months ago
- Mac OS, iOS, and Safari support JPEG-XL
- Windows has first party JPEG-XL support as of this year (admittedly it's opt in rather than default)
- Essentially every major image processing app, editor, or drawing app supports JPEG-XL
- Firefox has preliminary support for JPEG-XL gated behind a feature flag and the nightly release.
- The JPEG-XL team is writing a direct port of the reference libjxl library into rust[1]. There already exists a third party rust port by some of the mainline contributors and it has ironed out a lot of the issues with the porting process prior to this mainline port. This first party rust port is intended to be gradually brought up to a hardened, production ready state.
- Mozilla has stated they have no objections to fully adopting JPEG-XL in Firefox once the rust port is production ready [2].
The last major barriers other than getting the rust code production ready will be chrome and android's first party support/adoption.
------
TLDR: JPEG-XL is very much not dead and instead people are nose down working hard to continue pushing its adoption forward.
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1. https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs
2. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064
ekunazanu|7 months ago
I was not aware of this. Also judging by this and the sibling comments, it looks like the momentum didn't die despite Google's apathy. Hopefully the fact that their own team is now developing the rust port, as well as the growing support in other platforms, is enough to make Google reconsider its choices.
donatzsky|7 months ago
jandrese|7 months ago
JyrkiAlakuijala|7 months ago
my guesswork is that JPEG XL will likely outlive Chrome by 100+ years
tristor|7 months ago
arp242|7 months ago
This is also why Firefox doesn't support it by default (IIRC it doesn't even link against libjpegxl by default in release builds – only nightly ones).
There is nothing preventing the Chrome or Firefox people from revisiting all of this in the future.
It seems to me the Rust implementation of JPEG XL is by far the best path forward for broad JPEG XL support in Firefox, Chrome, and other browsers. While Rust is of course not a complete guarantee there will never be any security issues, it does eliminate virtually all of the major exploits that have targeted image decoders in the past. Both Firefox and Chrome have expressed interest in this.
badgersnake|7 months ago
fc417fc802|7 months ago
Dwedit|7 months ago
robertoandred|7 months ago