webp

#PNG is back after 20 years!

https://www.programmax.net/articles/png-is-back/

I was hoping it dies a silent death in favour of #AVIF aed #WebP but I guess it is here to stay.

For me, I'm excited about finally integrating #APNG (animated PNG) because that has been around for years!

I even used APNG in my blog articles! (But only Firefox users can see it animated until this year. I can now see it animated in Blink-based and Chromium-based browsers in Android.)

Here's a review I wrote back in 2015 where I used APNG: https://im.youronly.one/snoworld/a-brilliant-young-mind-2015282/

But we already nave #GIF ! Well, APNG is better. 😝

Also see: https://docs.fileformat.com/image/apng/ (which needs to be updated with new information)

This demonstrates quite well why low-effort image codecs are dead on arrival. And the explanation is quite simple — these aren't really image codecs, they were never designed to be that! These are video codecs applied to static images disguised as brand new image codecs: #WebP is VP9, HEIF is HEVC also known as H.265 and AVIF is AV1.
And indeed, for video even 8193x4320 leaves some headroom — not for photos, given how having a high-resolution camera system became a major selling point of high-end smartphones, even 16383x16383 might seem lacking tomorrow.

Or course this can be worked around as to a degree all of these are extensible, e.g. AVIF has advanced profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVIF#Profiles
According to Wikipedia:

Coded image items compliant to the AVIF Advanced profile may not have a total number of pixels greater than 35,651,584, a width greater than 16,384, or a height greater than 8,704. It is still possible to use the Advanced profile to create larger images using grid derivation.

Problem is — your existing software and even hardware might not support this advanced profile. WebPee has already already been extended to have the features listed in the table — and it is still severely limited.
So why bother supporting all this bestiary of formats, which are essentially gimmicks and not go all in with true image codec that has all the advantages and features and none of the limitations?
Hm-m-m… Indeed, why? 😏

#JPEG-XL

Woah, JPEG XL is making a comeback in Chrome: https://windowsreport.com/google-revisits-jpeg-xl-in-chromium-after-earlier-removal/

Meanwhile Mozilla awaits for decoder to be re-implemented in Rust in order to bring it to Firefox: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064

All while current libjxl-based implementation works with a set of patches.
Google developer mentions animation support, with these patches all of the advanced features on JPEG XL test page work: advanced colour management, transparency, animations.

Forks of Firefox have these patches, Waterfox: https://github.com/BrowserWorks/waterfox/pull/2938
And Librewolf: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/source/src/branch/main/patches/JXL_improved_support.patch

Sadly, these fail to be applied cleanly to newer Firefox code base and no one seems to care enough to fix it.
It's not perfect, it might require some testing — and of course it would require porting to newer code base, but it does work!
See for yourself, here is my own build of old ESR (115): https://nosh0b10.m0xee.net/m0xEE/p/1763414039.727405
It also works on mobile: https://nosh0b10.m0xee.net/m0xEE/p/1762130588.104733
No, support for WebP is not broken — it's disabled on purpose, I have actually patched the about:config setting that made it optional back in after Mozilla for some reason (hehe 😏) removed it in version 119.

So this is what we could have today — without going the roundabout way with Rust. And Google claimed in the past that there is no interest for it — I'm interested, and we get support for AVIF, HEIF and WebP — in which I'm personally not interested in the slightest.
And libwebp, which Firefox uses for WebP support is not in Rust — but not only they are not waiting for Rust implementation, they make support for it non-optional right after critical vulnerability gets found in its code: https://thehackernews.com/2023/09/mozilla-rushes-to-patch-webp-critical.html
Vulnerability gets discovered in September, in October Mozilla releases Firefox 119: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/119.0/releasenotes/ removing image.webp.enabled from about:config making support for WebP non-optional. Support provided by exact same library affected by the vulnerability — albeit already patched.
No requirement for it being in Rust in sight!

Support for #WebP becomes mandatory, experimental incomplete support for JPEG XL can't even be enabled with image.jxl.enabled set to true in about:config — it can only be enabled at build time, by default it's only enabled in Nightly developer builds.

Why do these image formats get glaringly different treatment?

#jpegXL