Comment by rmunn
4 hours ago
I would argue that even if JPEG XL isn't the best choice for Web images, if browsers don't support it then that will widely hinder its adoption for its non-Web use cases. Would you agree?
The scenario I'm thinking of is sending a photograph by email. Let's say Sally has just had her second baby, and wants to send baby pictures to her mother, the baby's grandmother. Neither Sally nor her mother are computer professionals, and they don't want to care about image formats. Sally wants to upload a file from her camera, attach it to an email, and send it. Her mother wants to click on the email and see pictures of her new grandchild. Neither one of them wants to have to convert the image themselves.
Let's say it's a few years in the future and Sally's camera produces JPEG XL files by default. (Which I don't think would happen if browsers didn't support it, for exactly the reason I'm about to articulate). If Sally's mother's browser doesn't support displaying JPEG XL, then although Sally (who uses a different browser than her mother) sees the picture in the email when she sends it, her mother writes back an email saying "the picture didn't show up, can you resend it?" And they spend a few back-and-forth emails before finally getting tech support from a friend who helps Sally convert the picture to old-school JPEG so her mother can see it.
If that's the experience for end-users, cameras would hesitate to switch to JPEG XL as a default format. Because nobody wants a hostile review from a user saying "My mother couldn't load my baby pictures, what kind of lousy camera are you making?"
So even if it's not the best format for the Web, I'm still persuaded that having universal browser support for a format intended for photos is an important factor, and devices like cameras will not switch to it as a default format until manufacturers are certain that browser support (and OS support, and electronic photo frame support, and so on) is nearly universal.
None of that takes away from the argument "Other image formats are better for saving space on the Web", which is the main thrust of your post. But I do disagree with the last line, "I'm just not personally convinced we need it in browsers any time soon." I believe that if browser adoption is lacking, adoption of the format in places where it makes lots of sense (like cameras) will also be slow.
What are your thoughts on that argument?
> But I do disagree with the last line, "I'm just not personally convinced we need it in browsers any time soon." I believe that if browser adoption is lacking, adoption of the format in places where it makes lots of sense (like cameras) will also be slow.
I'm not even personally convinced it is useful for cameras. Sally's situation isn't particularly bandwidth or feature-constrained, so JPEG or PNG work. Maybe JXL is solving problems that don't exist?
HDR is something many photography enthusiasts are interested in, and the ability to losslessly transcode from JPEG to JPEG XL (and back again if you have to) is actually IMHO the "killer app" for the format. Many people have years of irreplaceable family photos in JPEG format, and being told "you can fit 30% more photos on the same hard disk without any loss of quality" would certainly sell me on converting my photo library to JPEG XL. (The jpegxl.com site says "up to 60% smaller" so I'm going to guess that 30% is a safe average gain and it might be more).
And nearly everyone who takes photos of their family ends storage-constrained on cameras at some point. Memory cards only holding so much is less of an issue than it used to be, but in my experience the only people with laptops that have more than 1 TB of disk space are the computer professionals I know; every non-computer professional I personally know has 1 TB or less, usually 512 GB. That's room for plenty of photos, but not an infinite amount, and the photo collection (plus videos of baby's first steps and so on) is competing with a lot of other things for storage space. So being able to shrink the collection size by 30% or more with no artifacting added is definitely going to be worth it for one of the biggest selling points for cameras. (Including the cameras on smartphones).
I wouldn't say that JXL is absolutely vital and the industry should switch right now. But I would say that it's likely to be the only image format that has a chance to displace JPEG among the average camera user. Having JPEG in the name is also going to be a major selling point; don't underestimate that. (And the JPEG <-> JPEG XL conversion being lossless will complete the selling point).
Since (if I'm right) it's going to end up ubiquitous, then even if another format would be technically better, it would be wise for everyone writing software that handles images — browsers, OS file explorers, and so on — to make sure their software can support it. Just on general principles of supporting every widely-used format and every format that looks likely to be widely-used in the future.
> I would argue that even if JPEG XL isn't the best choice for Web images, if browsers don't support it then that will widely hinder its adoption for its non-Web use cases.
Both Firefox and Chrome [1] have committed to shipping JPEG XL later this year. Safari has supported JPEG XL since 2023, though their implementation doesn't support progressive images yet.
So the major web browsers will support JPEG XL later this fall.
[1]: "Intent to Ship: JPEG XL" - https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/08/intent-to-ship-jpeg-xl/