G“oogle Shows Why it Has Too Much Power Over the Web By Dropping JPEG-XL Support.” More Firefox Musings
Google continues to show why it has too much power over the Web.
The JPEG image format is very old. It dates back to 1992. The reason people are still using it is almost entirely due to software patent messes on newer formats.
Every time someone wants to do better, a “patent pool” forms to sue people in the ground if they actually use it, and support withers.
While I understand that Microsoft now has a patent that could describe something JPEG-XL does, and that is alarming, Google itself appears to have prior art.
I don’t use anything newer than 1992 JPEG myself because you can never be sure how it will be handled client-side if you try something else.
Other Free Software formats tend to produce larger files.
Apple, for its part, says it will implement JPEG-XL anyway in the iPhones. We’ll see what Google does if people start posting them to the Web anyway.
Potentially, caching servers could otherwise use them but only if you’re using a Safari user agent. We’ve seen this before with JPEG2000.
There are too many image formats out there that are not clearly different enough from each other. I even have some WebP photos because it’s all I could get a Web server to give me.
Now Google is walking away from that, and I’ll undoubtedly have some “AV1F”s at some point too.
One of the problems with all these “even better than JPEG” formats is the patents, but another is the support, like when you try to send off to Walmart’s photo lab for prints.
My spouse’s damned iPhone shoots to HEIF files, which are cumbersome to store in an authentic JPEG standard to send to be developed.
Quite often there is even additional file data which is parsed out, making the thing look a bit worse than if he had a device, like Android, which shoots to JPEG to begin with.
I’m getting real sick of all these damn Google image formats. I was really hoping JPEG-XL would come about and be the de-facto standard for the next 30 years or so.
But it looks like we’re in for an endless bout of Google codecs that last 3-5 years before they’re onto something else. They never stop and support what they do.
At the first chance they get, they will ditch it and run.
Google sucks. They (and Apple) are causing the very proliferation of pointlessly different formats they accuse JPEG-XL of.
Google is making new formats almost faster than rabbits can reproduce. Frequently, and without much thought.
The only advantage Firefox-type browsers (Gecko) have left, now that they carry almost no clout with Web developers, due to the spyware and much inferior Google Chrome and Edge, is that Mozilla hasn’t managed to shoot themselves in the foot for the last time by neutering the WebExtensions the way Chrome does, which is about to get even worse with ManifestV3.
Google only considers Google. To Hell with everyone else. Chrome’s extensions support was designed to be as good as it had to be to kill Firefox, and now that that’s done, they spring the trap and neuter privacy and ad-blocking extensions.
Essentially the only reason left to run a Gecko browser is this, but Firefox has so much built-in spyware and adware, I’ve moved everything to LibreWolf to stop the insanity.
There’s so much garbage in Firefox (and most browsers) now that it almost defies documenting how to set it up, and even if you do, they’ll just change the GUI again, so it’s almost pointless.
At least with the fork, the LibreWolf developers can stay current with all the garbage that Mitchell Baker adds to Mozilla Firefox to pad her paychecks while the company dies and fires people who were doing useful work.
Unfortunately, Mozilla’s other damage to the Web, being a flunky of Google’s decisions (like the JPEG-XL one) are harder to fix with a fork few people use.
Pale Moon added JPEG-XL, which is odd. They don’t really have any pull and they admit that they’re going to have to rebase on Firefox yet again at some point because…hard forks are hard to keep going. ⬆