this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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263
JPEG XL: How It Started, How It’s Going (cloudinary.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology
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[–] teolan 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What does google gains by making AVIF win rather than AVIF?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AVIF is derived from the AV1 video codec, which the AOM created, which Google is a part of. The data (basically every single metric), the community, and the websites all favor JXL, and yet Google is intentionally forcing the inferior WebP+AVIF pair against the tide. We can only speculate as to their true reasoning but the most likely answer is that they want their own formats to "win" the next standards race - what benefit that gives them besides ego I truly don't know.

[–] teolan 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

But google also participated to the creation of JPEG-Xl.

And having "their" standard win does not make any sense to me to see where they benefit from it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As I said earlier and have repeated:

I follow JXL relatively closely and I still am not 100% sure why they went through with this

If you've got a better guess please share. No one knows why they've done it except Google. The popular theory is that they're doing so to push WebP+AVIF instead, because it's one of few ideas that makes sense. We know their decision is political in some nature:

  • they intentionally misrepresented the interest from companies and the community on their bugtracker
  • they gauged this "interest" after only about half a year of being hidden behind an opt-in flag, which is not a fair assessment as websites could not activate JXL delivery
  • the public benchmark that they published was conducted so poorly it's hard to believe that it wasn't done intentionally
  • after a thorough rebuttal to the flawed methodology was posted, Google has not responded, redone their benchmarks, or reconsidered the data
  • benchmark after benchmark shows JXL dominating AVIF by a similar margin that AVIF dominates WebP, along with the large featureset that JXL carries compared to AVIF and especially compared to WebP - yet Google claims that there's no clear benefit to the format
  • AVIF and WebP were not subjected to this much scrutiny when being activated in Chromium. Those passed into live builds without much interest, and in the case of WebP there wasn't even a clear benefit over JPEG.

Making one or two of these mistakes before correcting them might be understandable, but making all of them and going radio silent when called out for them means they're doing this with a motive that is not data-driven or in good faith.