Comment by weinzierl

11 hours ago

True, but in my opinion JPEG XL has the right balance of features to become a true replacement of almost every relevant image format we use today, on the web and elsewhere.

Nothing is perfect and niche formats will always be necessary but I think JPEG XL has a good chance to become the USB of image formats.

Yeah. Here is a surprisingly readable article on all the supported features and design decisions of JPEG XL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05987

The format is designed to be as general as possible, potentially replacing many common (JPEG, GIF, PNG) and professional image formats.

For example, JPEG XL supports pages (e.g. for comic books), layers (with variable frame sizes, positions and blend modes) and timed animations.

  • I wish they had kept the support for progressive decoding of animations just like FLIF had but I guess they had to draw the complexity line somewhere.

  • That was indeed surprisingly readable and very in-depth at the same time. Thanks for sharing!

How about AVIF?

I have not read that many direct comparisons here.

  • In my experience, it's competitive on output size but not on compression speed. If you're not compressing online then that's fine, but we're running a service that resizes and recompresses on the fly. We serve JXL if the client indicates support for it, JPEG using JXL's jpegli, WebP, or PNG, depending on various factors.