Free Software Group criticizes Google for abandoning the compact JPEG XL format

According to the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Chrome’s decision to drop support for the compressed image format that Google helped develop is another sign of the advertising company’s “alarming level of control”over browsers and the web.

In a statement, Greg Farow, campaign manager at FSF, drew attention to Google’s stated reason for not supporting the JPEG XL image format, which was based on Google’s own PIK format. A Google engineer, commenting on the JPEG XL issue tracker in Chromium, Chrome’s main open source project, wrote that “there is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL.”The format also “does not offer sufficient additional benefits over existing formats,”and removing it “reduces the maintenance burden,”the engineer writes.

“Leaving aside the problematic aspects of the term ‘ecosystem’ when you yourself are by far the largest and most dangerous predator in said ‘ecosystem’,” Farow wrote (adding his own link). “Assuming that Google is measuring what the ‘ecosystem’ wants, really all Google is doing is asking itself what Google wants.”

If you don’t recognize JPEG XL, it’s because it’s pretty easy to miss. The format was frozen at the end of 2020 and was available as an experimental feature (i.e. setting a flag) in Chrome version 91. It was removed in Chrome 110 (as I confirmed in Chrome 112). Proponents of JPEG XL have suggested that widespread adoption of the format could result in a 25 to 30 percent reduction in global bandwidth usage (paywall).

However, even with their optimism, people like Cloudinary’s Jon Sneyers told New Scientist in 2021 that adoption is “almost a political issue, as companies can have their own file formats that are subject to royalties that they would like to see adopted.”as standards..» At that time, very few programs supported JPEG XL.

“Once we get support in at least a large portion of [Internet] browsers, companies like Facebook will probably roll out pretty quickly, and others will follow,” Sneyers told New Scientist.

Sneyers’ less optimistic predictions came true, but not with respect to fees. Instead, Apple, Google and Mozilla supported AV1F. Support for the AV1F display is already built into Android 12, macOS 13, iOS 16, and a host of browsers (although, curiously, not Microsoft Edge).

While AV1F is licensed royalty-free, EU antitrust regulators are investigating exactly how the technology is licensed by the Open Media Alliance (AOM), which includes many of the world’s largest technology firms.

“The [European] Commission has information that the AOM and its members may impose licensing conditions (compulsory cross-licensing without royalties) on innovators who were not part of the AOM at the time the technical AV1 was created, but whose patents are deemed necessary for (its) technical specifications,” according to a questionnaire sent to technology companies, according to Reuters.

Complicating the odds of JPEG-XL even further, Microsoft has secured a patent for the core compression algorithm used in JPEG XL along with a host of other compression schemes. Digital imaging experts are divided over whether this is a problem for JPEG XL. Ars contributor Timothy Lee told The Register that Microsoft’s patent, issued three years after Google filed for a similar patent for an asymmetric number system (ANS), illustrates broader problems with the software patent system.

For its part, Mozilla, both a proponent of AV1F and a browser company that the FSF specifically points out as capable of curbing Chrome’s hegemony, declared itself “neutral”in a late-January standards position post on GitHub. Martin Thomson of Mozilla wrote that while JPEG XL “offers some potential benefits”, it “doesn’t perform better enough than its closest competitors (e.g. AV1F) to justify an addition on that basis alone”. Mozilla may support JPEG XL “if usage becomes more common, but it will be a product decision.”

One thing that could certainly make the use of JPEG XL more common would be Chrome’s full adoption of this format. Chrome accounts for nearly two-thirds of browser usage worldwide, according to StatCounter, and roughly 80 percent if you include Chromium-based browsers (Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, among others). The JPEG files themselves have been around, albeit optimized, for 30 years, in large part due to their ubiquity in software, devices, and the wider web. Chrome recently moved the WebGPU API from a checked option to default support, promising huge potential for highly portable graphics.

Google, having decided to deprecate JPEG XL in Chrome, opened source the “spotlight model “machine learning tool used in the format in December 2022. It works by guessing which area of ​​the image will grab people’s attention first to prioritize that area’s resolution. before loading the rest of the image.