Why JPEG XL Ignoring Bit Depth Is Genius (and Why AVIF Can't Pull It Off)
12 comments
·October 27, 2025diffuse_l
evertedsphere
the article could be better if it weren't entirely "ai generated"
est
> JPEG XL’s Radical Solution: Float32 + Perceptual Intent
So 2^32 bit depth? 4 bytes seems an overkill.
fps-hero
Did you miss the point of the article? JPEG-XL encoding doesn't rely on quantisation to achieve its performance goals. Its a bit like how GPU shaders use floating point arithmetic internally but output quantised values for the bit depth of the screen.
zokier
Working with single fixed bit depth is imho different than being bit-depth agnostic. Same argument could be made about color spaces too.
kiicia
jpeg xl is fantastic, yet autocratic google wants to force inferior format
homebrewer
Mozilla also isn't interested in supporting it, it's not just Google. I also often see these articles that tout jpeg-xl's technical advantages, but in my subjective testing with image sizes you would typically see on the web, avif wins every single time. It not only produces fewer artifacts on medium-to-heavily compressed images, but they're also less annoying: minor detail loss and smoothing compared to jpeg-xl's blocking and ringing (in addition to detail loss; basically the same types of artifacts as with the old jpeg).
Maybe there's a reason they're not bothering with supporting xl besides misplaced priorities or laziness.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo
> Mozilla also isn't interested in supporting it
Mozilla is more than willing to adopt it. They just won't adopt the C++ implementation. They've already put into writing that they're considering adopting it when the rust implementation is production ready.
m-schuetz
Now I'm feeling a bit less bad for not using Firefox anymore. Not using it because it's C++ is <insert terms that may not be welcome on HN>
masklinn
You have a really strange interpretation of the word “consider”.
Retric
JPEG-XL is optimized for the low to zero levels of compression which isn’t as commonly used on the web, but definitely fills a need.
Google citied insufficient improvements which is a rather ambiguous statement. Mozilla seems more concerned with the attack surface.
eviks
> Maybe there's a reason they're not bothering with supporting xl besides misplaced priorities or laziness.
That can't be it, otherwise they'd simply publish those reasons in a way that's not vague and can't be ridiculed by the experts
I think the article could be better and get the point across with half the length and without the second half of it being full of ai generated list of advantages, or using that space to give some more technical information