I remember being a big fan of FLIF when it came out. I remember it had come out of nowhere to steal PNG’s crown, and then the author suddenly disappeared before finishing it. I soon learned they had been picked up by a company to work on a successor named FUIF and then some time after that FUIF was merged into JPEG XL.
Because of this, I was really excited when JPEG XL came out. An obscure but brilliant format had essentially been merged into the successor to JPEG, and I thought it was really going to take off. It had support from many major tech companies including Google. Browsers quickly started adding experimental support and then… nothing.
Soon after JPEG XL was finalised, AVIF was too, and AVIF was essentially Google’s attempt at making a successor to WebP, by using much the same technology as AV1. So the question was, which one to support? Google made a comparison between image formats, focusing almost exclusively on lossy compression ratios (which I think isn’t entirely fair, considering they both have a lossless mode to compete with PNG) and AVIF won. So they dropped JPEG XL from Chromium, claiming lack of interest or something (which was wild, I’d never heard of a faster uptake of an image format). Soon after, Firefox was talking about removing it too, but ended up deciding to wait and see.
Things looked bleak until Apple picked it up, and then things have just stalled since. I’m happy there’s still interest in JPEG XL, its FLIF/FUIF derived lossless encoding produces smaller files than both AVIF’s lossless encoding and PNG, while having features neither could dream of.
I remember being a big fan of FLIF when it came out. I remember it had come out of nowhere to steal PNG’s crown, and then the author suddenly disappeared before finishing it. I soon learned they had been picked up by a company to work on a successor named FUIF and then some time after that FUIF was merged into JPEG XL.
Because of this, I was really excited when JPEG XL came out. An obscure but brilliant format had essentially been merged into the successor to JPEG, and I thought it was really going to take off. It had support from many major tech companies including Google. Browsers quickly started adding experimental support and then… nothing.
Soon after JPEG XL was finalised, AVIF was too, and AVIF was essentially Google’s attempt at making a successor to WebP, by using much the same technology as AV1. So the question was, which one to support? Google made a comparison between image formats, focusing almost exclusively on lossy compression ratios (which I think isn’t entirely fair, considering they both have a lossless mode to compete with PNG) and AVIF won. So they dropped JPEG XL from Chromium, claiming lack of interest or something (which was wild, I’d never heard of a faster uptake of an image format). Soon after, Firefox was talking about removing it too, but ended up deciding to wait and see.
Things looked bleak until Apple picked it up, and then things have just stalled since. I’m happy there’s still interest in JPEG XL, its FLIF/FUIF derived lossless encoding produces smaller files than both AVIF’s lossless encoding and PNG, while having features neither could dream of.