Rick Byers, one of the technical leaders of the Google Chrome development team, announced the readiness to include a high-performance and memory-safe decoder for the JPEG-XL image format in the Chromium engine. The main criterion for activating the JPEG-XL decoder by default is the commitment to its long-term support.
It is noted that the decision was made due to changing circumstances following the latest assessment of the JPEG XL implementation status. Over the past two years, JPEG XL support has been added to the Safari browser, the developers of Firefox announced their intention to support JPEG XL, and the decision was made to include JPEG XL support in the PDF specification. Additionally, Google considered the feedback expressed by developers after the removal of JPEG XL from Chrome in 2022. The removal was carried out on the basis of low interest from the ecosystem, lack of sufficient advantages, and the desire to reduce maintenance load.
Following Rick's announcement, another developer published a report on the status of the proposed implementation of JPEG-XL in Chrome. It was indicated that the previously developed code in Chromium for JPEG-XL support has been updated and synchronized with the reference implementation of libjxl. Among the changes is animation support (other browsers do not yet support animation).
The JPEG XL format was standardized in 2021 (ISO/IEC 18181) as a universal replacement for JPEG, supporting compression of existing JPEG files without quality loss, a wide dynamic range, high resolution, and multilayer images. Among the advantages of JPEG XL are:
- Size reduction of up to 60% compared to JPEG images of identical quality;
- Support for HDR, animation, transparency, and progressive loading mode;
- Gradual quality degradation when reducing bitrate;
- Lossless JPEG compression (reducing JPEG size by up to 21% with the possibility of restoring the original state);
- Support for up to 4099 channels;
- A wide range of color depths;
- No need to pay patent royalties and the presence of an open reference implementation under a BSD license.
Source: opennet.ru
