While I agree with the @fsf warning about the emblematic value of the decision by #Google to pull support for #JpegXL from #Chrome, their article <https://u.fsf.org/3z8> is as empty as could be, especially considering that #GNU#IceCat doesn't support JPEG XL either (being based on a #Firefox branch that doesn't build #JXL support in.) You want to show that #FLOSS can do without? Do it by actually supporting what you complain Google is failing to.
The only browser I actually know of that can support #JpegXL is #OtterBrowserhttps://otter-browser.org/ —a basically one-man effort to wrap the classic Opera/Presto UX on top of Qt-based web engines— and even then under the very specific conditions that the QtWebKit engine is used, with an environment variable set to enable support for “unsafe” formats (this, BTW, enables support for #MNG too).
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to give any weight to anybody talking about the #openWeb unless they start putting actual effort in to break through Google's monopoly. And if you ever dare talk about something like #JpegXL, you'd better do it from a position of credibility, which means supporting in the first place.
For #Firefox and its forks, this means enabling it out of the box for main builds. For #Blink-based browsers (@Vivaldi are you listening?), this means rolling back Google's patch to remove it, and help maintain it with community effort. Ditto for #WebKit. The #openWeb needs something like what the #DocumentFoundation did for the office productivity suites and formats.
@oblomov I've asked a few times and I still don't understand why a Google-created image format is suddenly so necessary to the open web. Are we falling into the "enemy of my enemy" trap?
@nemobis It's quite diminutive to call JPEG-XL “a Google-created format”. It's a standardized format created to cover the entire span of features of existing formats (lossy and lossless compression, with transparency and optional animation) at a much higher density compared, and even allowing direct lossless transcoding from the most common format it would replace (JPEG). It's the closest thing we have today to a unified image format.
Well, this is interesting: there is already a community-supported patch for #Chromium derivatives that restores #JpegXL suppot https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium-libjxl
I'm looking forward to it being adopted by Linux distributions that roll their own Chromium, and by other Blink-based browsers with a claimed interest in open standards (glances at #VivaldiBrowser@Vivaldi)
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