Firefox 157 Will Include JPEG XL By Default On All Platforms (phoronix.com) 21
Mozilla plans to enable JPEG XL decoding by default in Firefox 157, which is due at the end of September. Phoronix reports: Firefox Nightly has JPEG-XL support enabled by default right now to help in vetting this support while Mozilla believes the support is in good enough shape for a stable debut with Firefox 157. This follows Chrome shipping JPEG-XL and Google Research developing jxl-rs as a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that is both performant and secure.
In today's Mozilla Hacks blog post they elaborate on JPEG-XL vs. AVIF image formats: "JPEG XL: Excels at lossless imagery, progressive rendering, and further compressing JPEGs without quality loss. AVIF: Excels at web-quality photographic images, and images that have a mix of sharp edges and flat surfaces. ... Although AVIF tends to produce smaller files at web-quality than JPEG XL, AVIF only has basic progressive rendering support. So, for very large images, it may be worth taking the filesize hit with JPEG XL."
In today's Mozilla Hacks blog post they elaborate on JPEG-XL vs. AVIF image formats: "JPEG XL: Excels at lossless imagery, progressive rendering, and further compressing JPEGs without quality loss. AVIF: Excels at web-quality photographic images, and images that have a mix of sharp edges and flat surfaces. ... Although AVIF tends to produce smaller files at web-quality than JPEG XL, AVIF only has basic progressive rendering support. So, for very large images, it may be worth taking the filesize hit with JPEG XL."
Double or nothing (Score:3)
” So, for very large images, it may be worth taking the filesize hit with JPEG XL”
XL it is. If the file already is large, make it even larger!
JPEG was good enough (Score:2)
JPEG was good enough for DECADES and we have tons more speed and bandwidth today than in the 1990s. It's lacking just a few things that don't matter a whole lot for the web today.
Many replacements have been attempted but nobody has supplanted it because picky nerd battles do not matter over what is established as getting the job done for most everybody. Google did not help with it pushing it's own crap which wouldn't have gone anywhere without a monopoly and even then they didn't replace JPEG.
XL seems to m
Re: (Score:2)
Having real alpha without requiring lossless photos is probably the big benefit on the web as far as file size. But this format seems like a kitchen sink. It might as well not be named JPEG-XL and be named WebP-XL considering the feature overlap.
Re: (Score:2)
My last donation to Mozilla was nothing, so I'll be completely happy to double it for another feature I don't need or want.
I might consider donating if it would get them to stop creating new security vulnerabilities in unneeded features. Or if my donation would get them to fix ancient problems like the memory leak that makes Firefox essentially unusable in Linux. (That one goes back many months and I saw it again about two days ago. However the main reason I don't do any serious work with Linux now is the l
Our long national nightmare is over (Score:3)
WebPee can finally go back into the yellow googlehole it crawled out of.
'Web Quality' ??? (Score:5, Interesting)
As if AI slop wasn't a problem. For years image quality has tanked as many have been re-compressed many times over, often for no reason. Then you have the people that think upscaling an image 3x makes it more detailed and sharper... Ugh.
Quality (Score:2)
Tell us you mean crap without saying crap.
So "Good enough for general web use" is crap? Do you think everything should be sent as deflate compressed WQUXGA PNGs?
Re: (Score:2)
I would never use such a low resolution image.
Re: (Score:2)
The tech is fine when used correctly, but that's not how it works out in the real world.
Upload an image to a service and it probably wants to blindly re-compress it down to it's own standards to conserve bandwidth. For most people that is an image downloaded from a site that already re-compressed it down to it's own standards to conserve bandwidt
Re: (Score:3)
If the compressed image is from the original source it will be just fine. The problem is that most re-compressed images comes from an already compressed copy.
And that was a design criteria for JPEG-XL. It's designed to recompress existing JPEGs without loosing much fidelity. I've played around with it and it's pretty good. It's very source-dependent, if a JPEG is already poorly compressed it will look worse. A good quality JPEG, say from a phone, recompresses nicely. You have to blow up the image quite a bit to notice any difference, hence it's fine for general web use. My current standard for lossy compression is AVIF, and I'm seriously considering switching o
Re: Quality (Score:2)
It sounds like you're still recoding it. I believe the design goal you are referring to is *absolutely no change* in the image. In fact, it goes futher: I believe there's a path to convert a JPEG to a JPEG XL that is typically much smaller such that you can undo the conversion from the JXL and get back the exact bit-identical JPEG file you started from.
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't? You might want to tell these folks [youtube.com].
Umm.. Are you sure its 157??? (Score:2)
I'm running what Ubuntu presents as the current version of FF, which is 147.0.4.. HOW is FF going to get to 157 by the end of next month???
Re: (Score:3)
You're probably running the extended support release. Usual versions (in particular Windows) get every two weeks a new Firefox. Ubuntu LTS, Debian, etc. install a ESR release, which gets maintenance updates when needed and only every few month a major update (leaving out in-between versions).
Re: (Score:3)
Firefox ESR were 91, 102, 115, 140, 153.
Latest release is 154.0.1
Look at the "Related Links" (Score:4, Informative)
One of the Related Links I saw here was https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/13/2026229/jpeg-xl-image-support-returns-to-latest-chromechromium-code [slashdot.org] - Chrome has been offering this since mid January. If it works on Chrome - and is a positive feature - then it is time for Firefox to offer it.
Shout it from the rooftops (Score:2)
With Firefox capturing 3% of the market is this really newsworthy?
Re: (Score:2)
I am one of the 3%. My mother says I'm special!
But (a) it's written in Rust because Mozilla didn't trust C++ (b) Google did the implementation so it's an example of both parties collaborating regardless of the Chromium/Gecko divide.
Re: (Score:2)
But (a) it's written in Rust because Mozilla didn't trust C++
It was not that they did not trust C++ (itself) but it is easier to verify the rust implementation (because rust does a lot of the memory safety checks at compile time), and there is a long long long history of codecs having memory safety issues. One less potential future exploit is always a good thing (one should note that rust does not protect against logic errors, so the code may still be wrong, just potentially less wrong).
k but (Score:2)
'k, but how 'bout txt comp? Just for the web, course. Qnty over qlty, 'k?