FSF Chromes JPEG XL killing shows how the web works under browser hegemony

News Summary

  • "Once we have support in at least a big chunk of the [Internet] browsers, the companies like Facebook will probably start deploying quite quickly and others will follow," Sneyers told New Scientist.Sneyers' less optimistic predictions came true, though not with regard to royalties.
  • Chrome recently moved the WebGPU API from a flagged option to default support, promising huge potential for highly portable graphics.Google, having decided to drop JPEG XL in Chrome, open-sourced an "attention center model" machine learning tool used in the format in December 2022.
  • A Google engineer, commenting on the JPEG XL issue tracker on Chromium, Chrome's open source core project, wrote that "there is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL."
  • The format also "does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats," and removing it "reduces the maintenance burden," the engineer wrote.
  • "One thing that certainly could have made JPEG XL usage more widespread would have been Chrome's full adoption of the format.
  • It works by guessing which area of an image will catch people's eyes first to prioritize that area's resolution before the rest of the image is loaded.
Enlarge/ When Google, whose Chromium/Chromerelated browsers make up 80% of browser share, says that something has not enough interest from the entire ecosystem, what does that mean, exactly?27 w [+4899 chars]