Google Outlines Why They Are Removing JPEG-XL Support From Chrome

[gbcox]

Wow. Those bullshit excuses backup my claim of Antitrust yesterday a lot more than they defend Google for making a rational, thought-out decision.
Forget writing the Google Bug Tracker, write your Senator or Representative; State and Federal. If you're not American: write to your equivalent government agency and have them pressure America to do something about American companies having too much power. It probably wouldn't hurt to write to Mozilla, Microsoft, and any other Google (Chrome) competitor you can think of to get them to pressure the government into doing something.

Agree. Just to reiterate what I said in the previous post, people should drop Chrome and it's chrome-a-clones and switch to Firefox. That would be much faster than waiting on the political / judicial process. That said, most people aren't going to be aware of JPEG-XL, but maybe they'll notice when Manifest V3 limits their ad-blocking capabilities.

[skeevy420]

Agree. Just to reiterate what I said in the previous post, people should drop Chrome and it's chrome-a-clones and switch to Firefox. That would be much faster than waiting on the political / judicial process. That said, most people aren't going to be aware of JPEG-XL, but maybe they'll notice when Manifest V3 limits their ad-blocking capabilities.

I agree and disagree on the awareness part. A lot of us nerds are fully aware and regular users are just now getting the chance to be aware since it is just now being added to mainstream Adobe products. Regular users weren't even given the chance to become aware before Chrome cut XL. Web Admins were just now implementing it in anticipation of it leaving experimental status. The joke is on the Web Admins when XL leaves experimental status.

Manifest V3 definitely will if the exponential increase in complaints my family has about all the ads all on Google products in the past month is any indication. There's a really, really good chance that V3 will be what gets my family off of Chrome.

I've told everyone for the past 20 years to use anything else, preferably Firefox, with an ad blocker and to only use Chrome as a backup. For some reason all they hear is "Run Chrome without an adblocker" and it drives me berserk.

[Artim]

Wow. Those bullshit excuses backup my claim of Antitrust yesterday a lot more than they defend Google for making a rational, thought-out decision.

Their first and last claims apply to everything, everywhere, from everyone.



Code shouldn't be an indefinite experiment.

You don't say.



Removing something reduces its maintenance burden? No shit, Sherlock. That's how it works.

Those bullshit reasons apply to everything.

Let's get to the meat and potatoes:



All the comments of support and praise from companies and people in your own bug tracker proves that wrong. All the companies and programs implementing JPEG-XL proves that wrong.



Every single independent benchmark I've seen proves that wrong outside of video clips.

So half their reasons are bullshit, the other half are outright lies, and the people in charge of the decision making process have a vested interest in the codecs that compete with JPEG-XL succeeding and JPEG-XL failing. Those last two are literally why we have antitrust laws.

In the United States, antitrust law is a collection of mostly federal laws that regulate the conduct and organization of businesses to promote competition and prevent unjustified monopolies.

Those decisions by Google engineers, who have a vested interest in the competing standards of AVIF and WebP succeeding, stifle their JPEG-XL competition by removing support for the JPEG-XL codec and then promote a Google technology monopoly by lying about the community interest in JPEG-XL and the incremental benefits that JPEG-XL offers.

That's ANTITRUST.

Forget writing the Google Bug Tracker, write your Senator or Representative; State and Federal. If you're not American: write to your equivalent government agency and have them pressure America to do something about American companies having too much power. It probably wouldn't hurt to write to Mozilla, Microsoft, and any other Google (Chrome) competitor you can think of to get them to pressure the government into doing something.

What utter bullshit. Even US Anti-Trust law can't be that bad. They are not actively preventing Jpeg-XL to be used, they merely don't waste ressources themselves. Anybody else that desires to can write a browser that includes support for it. They can also simply base it on Chromium, so they only have to take care of the Jpeg-XL support. But if that was already Anticompetitive, someone could already have forced e.g. Apple to support stuff like WebP, VP9 and and AV1 years ago, especially on iOS as it's impossible to use an actual alternative to Safari that's not just a Wrapper for it. And in the US, iOS has a market share of over 50 %.

[Pajn]

How are they judging interest? I'm very interessted in making use of it but since it isn't enabled by default in any browsers and are still lacking one if it's killer features (progressive decoding) I haven't been able to yet. Do they expect sites to use it before it's avalible so they can start to quantify "interest"? Especially when it's impossible to feature test progressive decoding support so that users that do have JXL enabled in browsers without support for progressive decoding get a worse experience than JPEG that's a really weird position.

[gbcox]

What utter bullshit. Even US Anti-Trust law can't be that bad. They are not actively preventing Jpeg-XL to be used, they merely don't waste ressources themselves. Anybody else that desires to can write a browser that includes support for it. They can also simply base it on Chromium, so they only have to take care of the Jpeg-XL support. But if that was already Anticompetitive, someone could already have forced e.g. Apple to support stuff like WebP, VP9 and and AV1 years ago, especially on iOS as it's impossible to use an actual alternative to Safari that's not just a Wrapper for it. And in the US, iOS has a market share of over 50 %.

Comparing Apple and their webp support vs. Chrome and their chrome-a-clones is apples and oranges. Remember Windows and IE? Your argument is Microsoft's behavior wasn't anti-competitive because people could just create another operating system and browser. Obviously, that isn't what happened. As far as iOS and their alternative to Safari and the wrapper, that situation looks to change soon with the EU DMA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act

[skeevy420]

What utter bullshit. Even US Anti-Trust law can't be that bad. They are not actively preventing Jpeg-XL to be used, they merely don't waste ressources themselves. Anybody else that desires to can write a browser that includes support for it. They can also simply base it on Chromium, so they only have to take care of the Jpeg-XL support. But if that was already Anticompetitive, someone could already have forced e.g. Apple to support stuff like WebP, VP9 and and AV1 years ago, especially on iOS as it's impossible to use an actual alternative to Safari that's not just a Wrapper for it. And in the US, iOS has a market share of over 50 %.

Chrome is basically the most used browser on all platforms. By preventing a technology from being available on their browser they're actively preventing its usage. It doesn't help matters when what few people were using JPEG-XL were all pushing their users towards Chrome. The part that makes this antitrust, however, is the fact that the people making the decisions have a vested interest in JPEG-XL not succeeding because they're the writers of AVIF and WebP. That's like letting Ford write the regulations for Chevy.

Apple makes overly priced niche products that have less than 20% marketshare and their entire shtick is pushing their hardware to push their software with their technologies. They're the NIH posterchild and advertise themselves as that. You know what you're getting into with them. They also don't prevent you, for the most part, from implementing it yourself. **Whistles in Vulkan**

What this kind of shows is that Chromium needs to be moved to an organization where Google isn't their primary steward. If Chrome has "become too big to fail" then Google should have to hand the reigns of the open source project over to an entity that doesn't have a vested commercial interest in anything from anyone so things like JPEG-XL can be fairly implemented without being gate-keeped by an AVIF contributor as was the case here.

[skeevy420]

How are they judging interest? I'm very interessted in making use of it but since it isn't enabled by default in any browsers and are still lacking one if it's killer features (progressive decoding) I haven't been able to yet. Do they expect sites to use it before it's avalible so they can start to quantify "interest"? Especially when it's impossible to feature test progressive decoding support so that users that do have JXL enabled in browsers without support for progressive decoding get a worse experience than JPEG that's a really weird position.

The few sites that were using it provided instructions on how to enable JPEG-XL on Chrome since it is arguably the easiest to use it on since it is just switching on an experimental flag on the standard version. Firefox requires the flag in addition to using the nightly version. Edge requires editing the launch parameters.

[testerus]

Agree. Just to reiterate what I said in the previous post, people should drop Chrome and it's chrome-a-clones and switch to Firefox. That would be much faster than waiting on the political / judicial process.

Unfortunatelly Firefox has not alloted any ressources to JPEG XL:
According to Old_Building_7587 on reddit:

In the case of Firefox, a year ago Samuel has written patches for Firefox to add JXL color profiles, progressive decoding, and animated JXL support (Bug numbers 1709814-1709816, 1709818), yet Mozilla has yet to review and merge them. So apparently Mozilla is not very interested in JXL (even though Firefox Nightly has preliminary support).

[Artim]

Comparing Apple and their webp support vs. Chrome and their chrome-a-clones is apples and oranges. Remember Windows and IE? Your argument is Microsoft's behavior wasn't anti-competitive because people could just create another operating system and browser. Obviously, that isn't what happened. As far as iOS and their alternative to Safari and the wrapper, that situation looks to change soon with the EU DMA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act

Your comparison makes no sense. MS was forced to give users the choice because

1. now and especially back then you couldn't just use any other OS as many programs won't work. Sure it has gotten much better, especially thanks to WINE, but still there are programs you can't run through WINE and that don't have Linux compatible alternatives
2. MS made it so it was impossible to write a browser that could display websites correctly. And if someone figured out how to improve compatibility, it most likely was infringing patents so they would have stopped that browser.

this is not the case with JXL and Chrome. Sure, Firefox' support for web standards is quite lacking, but like I said, it's not a problem to make a browser that has no compatibility issues that also supports JXL. Plus for all I know, support for unsupported formats can be provided by extensions. At least I remember those existing for APNG and other stuff. So you can really not tell anybody that they can't get JXL support even though Google isn't (currently) wasting any ressources on it.

[Artim]

Chrome is basically the most used browser on all platforms. By preventing a technology from being available on their browser they're actively preventing its usage. It doesn't help matters when what few people were using JPEG-XL were all pushing their users towards Chrome. The part that makes this antitrust, however, is the fact that the people making the decisions have a vested interest in JPEG-XL not succeeding because they're the writers of AVIF and WebP. That's like letting Ford write the regulations for Chevy.

Apple makes overly priced niche products that have less than 20% marketshare and their entire shtick is pushing their hardware to push their software with their technologies. They're the NIH posterchild and advertise themselves as that. You know what you're getting into with them. They also don't prevent you, for the most part, from implementing it yourself. **Whistles in Vulkan**

What this kind of shows is that Chromium needs to be moved to an origination where Google isn't their primary steward. If Chrome has "become too big to fail" then Google should have to hand the reigns of the open source project over to an entity that doesn't have a vested commercial interest in anything from anyone so things like JPEG-XL can be fairly implemented without being gate-keeped by an AVIF contributor as was the case here.

You really have no idea how little sense your text makes. Nobody prevents you from using JXL, it was never available out of the box by default and isn't in any other browser.

And no, Google doesn't have "interest in JPEG-XL not succeeding", they simply aren't interested in wasting resources on it when they don't see benefits for their usage. And the only benefit it has for usage in a browser would be progressive encoding. Or why do you think Google would not use a (maybe not for long) royalty-free codec when it would only benefit them? As any company, Google is driven by profit. And I already mentioned, if they could cut needed storage for GPhotos by simply converting all uploaded photos to JXL and if necessary convert back without any losses, trust me Google would already have done so, but they obviously see more drawbacks than many people here want to believe.

Also, according to your very questionable logic, that would mean the MPEG LA could simply force Google to support h.265 and h.266. Because in this case, Google and basically every company that's not part of the MPEG LA do want those codecs to fail in favor of VP9/AV1. And in this case indeed solely out of reasons of maximizing profits. Because Google only bought VP9, payed all questionable patent infringement costs and drives availability and hardware support so extensively simply because the MPEG LA literally lost their minds when they published the license costs for h.265. The only place Google does have support for it is in Androids media framework and for filming on Android devices. Everywhere else, they push for AV1, mainly together with Netflix and Intel who created quite a fast software encoder and the Videolan Team creating a very well optimized software decoder. That's what could be seen as anticompetitive. But I very much doubt any court would agree, otherwise you can bet your ass the companies behind the MPEG LA would have done so years ago, especially since greedy whores like Microsoft with their slave Nokia, and Apple are in the licensing pool. After all, at least the first two belong to the members that made their own patent pool to prevent license fees to be wavered for decoders.