JPEG XL is a royalty-free image codec. While being smaller than JPEGs when used as the primary format, it can also losslessly compress existing JPEGs which is great for space savings, as well as supporting features like progressive decoding that are missing from the video codec still formats like WebP/AVIF (which helps on slow connections or low-spec hardware). The codec is widely adopted by graphics applications like proprietary ones from Adobe & Apple but the open source ones like GIMP & Krita to name a few. One of the âinterestingâ missing spots for support is the Google Chrome browser & Androidâwhich offers an opportunity to distinguish the platform from Android to which a lot of folks would love to see & would make a headline in the geek world.
At present, *.jxl files do not render in the gallery / file viewer (tho the mime type is recognized) & image.jxl.enabled = true in the browser (no surprise since Mozilla locked it behind Nightly but some browsers like LibreWolf patched out that restriction so users can choose to enable it regardless). What I would like to see is minimally support of JPEG XL in the OS for viewing along with removing that Nightly browser restriction. If it is popular & leads to speed ups / space savings it would be great if the browser enabled it by default & apps like the camera use it by default or transparently compress its JPEG output for all usersâ benefit.
The drawbacks are that historically image codecs tend to be a vector for exploitation, but this is still a present threat with the existing codecs as well.