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

[birdie]

https://jpegxl.io/articles/rans/

https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/13/microsoft_ans_patent/

Yeah, exactly, there's prior art and any court in the US will throw this patent into the bin as soon as Microsoft tries to enforce it.

And don't get me started on VP9 and AV1 patent pools.

[Quackdoc]

Fellas, creating an account and leaving a comment is free, if you want to see them maybe backtrack, I would reccomend doing it

[JanC]

I wouldn’t be surprised if this move is mostly about forcing Microsoft to guarantee a free license.

Google itself might be able to fight Microsoft in court over this, but many small companies can’t afford that… (they would go bankrupt on lawyer fees before a court can make any decision).

[Quackdoc]

I wouldn’t be surprised if this move is mostly about forcing Microsoft to guarantee a free license.

Google itself might be able to fight Microsoft in court over this, but many small companies can’t afford that… (they would go bankrupt on lawyer fees before a court can make any decision).

to me it sounds more like them trying for webp2 or avif out of pride, considering the outright lies they told

[JanC]

to me it sounds more like them trying for webp2 or avif out of pride, considering the outright lies they told

JPEG XL & WEBP/AVIF cater to different audiences really, so I'm not sure how that would make sense.

[lectrode]

I wouldn’t be surprised if this move is mostly about forcing Microsoft to guarantee a free license.

Google itself might be able to fight Microsoft in court over this, but many small companies can’t afford that… (they would go bankrupt on lawyer fees before a court can make any decision).

As much as I'd like to believe that, you'd think they would mention something about a questionable license/ownership/etc as a part of why they're dropping it. As it stands, that's about the only reason they didn't mention. The only way that'd still be the case is if they're having direct talks with microsoft in the background where they say as much.

Guess we'll know if
1) ms officially acknowledges the patented tech as being "protected" for free/open source usage
2) google brings back support in their browser for it

[V1tol]

JPEG XL & WEBP/AVIF cater to different audiences really, so I'm not sure how that would make sense.

JPEG XL can provide static and animated content with great coding/decoding speed. Basically everything what modern web needs.

[JanC]

I agree that it’s uncertain & complicated, but I wanted to point out why it might be. ☺

[wswartzendruber]

In my estimation, a WebAssembly shim for JPEG XL will likely outperform native AVIF decoding backed by AVX2.

I wonder how large such a shim would be. Perhaps it could be hosted in a shared location, and therefore cached by our browsers.

[JanC]

JPEG XL can provide static and animated content with great coding/decoding speed. Basically everything what modern web needs.

But that’s not its main appeal.

AVIF/WEBP can take frames from AV1/VP8/VP9 videos without any need for re-encoding, which can be really useful.

From what I understand JPEG XL can do some things that the other image formats can’t do, even if sometimes those are mostly only useful for niche markets.

Hence why their markets don't overlap 100%.