S4E373 — Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome

GARY: --and Chrome has replaced every image format with JPEG Extra Large, which is-- okay, that's not the name.

MAEVE: Maeve. Venture capital.

OBI: Obi. Infrastructure.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field researcher.

GARY: Gary. Founder, broadly speaking. Obi, what's the actual name?

OBI: JPEG XL. Chrome 155 ships decoding support. Decoding, Gary. The browser can look at the file. That is the whole announcement.

GARY: But it wins. It's the winner now.

OBI: It is a decoder in a browser. Your toaster wins nothing.

MAEVE: Thirty to fifty percent smaller than JPEG. That's the headline. I invest in headlines. I have lost money on headlines.

OBI: And they wrote the decoder in Rust. jxl-rs. Memory-safe.

GARY: One format. Finally, one format to rule them all--

OBI: There's a rule of two in their security model, Gary. Two protections. Not two formats. Sit down.

GRUNER: Field note: humans invent new format to end formats. Now four formats. Is like peace conference. Peace conference end with more war.

MAEVE: Thread's open. Three hundred comments.

GARY: Oh, fuck, yes.

MAEVE: xx_ns: "It's exciting to see JXL support being re-added in Chrome after being removed a while ago."

OBI: Removed. Then re-added. Two years apart, same company, same format.

GARY: That's not a decision, that's a hostage situation. Somebody got fired--

MAEVE: Somebody got promoted. Indecision is just free strikes.

OBI: The article says the old decoder was a security risk. New one's Rust. That's the boring answer.

GARY: The boring answer is what they WANT you to think--

OBI: It's what they wrote down, Gary.

GARY: YesThatTom2 hoped for "the internal battle where Google executives trying to stop JPEG XL." I want that too! There has to be a villain. A guy. In a room.

MAEVE: There's always a guy. Sometimes the guy is a spreadsheet.

GARY: Not this time. I've lived this. When a company kills something good, it's politics. When it brings it back, it's a coup. I know coups.

OBI: You know one coup. It was a board meeting and you cried in the parking lot.

GARY: That was Bauxlite, and it was a parking STRUCTURE, and the point stands--

GRUNER: Chrome ships it now. Villain optional.

GARY: Thank you-- no, wait, that doesn't help me.

MAEVE: It doesn't. But it's true, which is new for this table.

OBI: Chronology, plainly. Removed in the Chrome 110 era. Years of nothing. Then a Rust decoder exists, memory-safe, fast, and suddenly it ships. That's not a coup. That's a prerequisite finally being met.

GARY: Or the prerequisite was invented to cover the coup--

OBI: Gary. You are the only man alive who hears "we fixed the security problem" and thinks "cover story."

GARY: Because I've BEEN the cover story! Cadence shipped a calendar nobody asked for, twelve users, nine of them my mother's book club, and when we killed it we told the board it was "strategic repositioning." That's coup language!

MAEVE: Nine book club members. Your mother controls forty percent of your market.

GARY: She's a very engaged user, Maeve, and honestly the retention was-- shit.

OBI: There it is. The actual number arrived and the theory died mid‑sentence.

GRUNER: Field note: founder defends conspiracy, loses to own mother.

GARY: She would've won the argument too. She's ruthless about calendars.

MAEVE: kelseydh: "Every time a new image format comes out, I think about the compatibility crisis between apps."

GARY: Crisis is strong. Chrome can show it, so it works.

OBI: The browser can look at it. Your file manager cannot. Different organs, Gary. Yours is decorative.

MAEVE: zarify: "one of my students tries to upload a WEBP to our school's LMS."

GARY: Okay, but that's a school problem.

MAEVE: It's a retention problem. Upload fails, user churns. From the format.

OBI: From the eighth grade, Maeve. The child churns from the eighth grade.

GRUNER: Format is hostage taker. Demands new software.

GARY: No, no, I've had this exact problem. I download an image and nothing opens it, so I screenshot my own screenshot like some kind of animal--

OBI: Congratulations. You independently arrived at the thread's position. From inside your own ass.

MAEVE: dist-epoch hates WebP for exactly that. mort96: "images they download from the web no longer work."

GARY: I said it better.

MAEVE: You said it later. Later is the opposite of better. Ask anyone who funded you.

OBI: And cosmic_cheese has the poetry. Parent context: WebP had slim support outside browsers. cosmic_cheese: "webp files kinda turned into lumps of coal when downloaded."

GARY: Thirty to fifty percent smaller, though.

OBI: Smaller on the wire, Gary. Then it lands on your disk as a lump of coal. You saved fifty percent of a thing nobody can fucking open.

GRUNER: Blyat. Compression of hostage, still hostage.

MAEVE: nemomarx flagged the same thing in Google Docs. Google's own tools won't open Google's own format.

GARY: That's actually insane. That's like Bauxlite's own smelter refusing our aluminum. Which happened. Twice.

OBI: And you shipped anyway. That's the founder spirit, Gary. Nobody on earth can stop you from delivering a broken thing.

GARY: Thank you?

MAEVE: It wasn't a compliment. But the churn math does love you.

GRUNER: Pixels escaped browser. Incarcerated on disk. Case closed.

GARY: See, that's my whole point--

OBI: It is the thread's point. You're just squatting in it, rent‑free, like your mother's book club in Cadence.

MAEVE: weinzierl: "JPEG XL has a good chance to become the USB of image formats."

GRUNER: USB of image formats. Fits everything, charges nothing.

OBI: The USB of image formats is still a JPEG, Gary. It just fits in more holes.

GARY: That's the dream, Obi! One plug!

OBI: You had one plug. Cadence.

GARY: Cadence was a calendar for people who hate calendars, and it worked--

MAEVE: You spent Cadence twenty minutes ago. Nine book club members. It's gone.

GARY: It's-- fine. New evidence. Broiler9437: "Art sites get the biggest gain with JXL. They can losslessly repackage every single JPEG uploads they have for practically zero cost."

OBI: "Practically zero cost." The four most expensive words on the internet.

MAEVE: Three words, Obi. And xigoi fit "several years of photos in a few gigabytes so I can easily back them up without going broke." That's a real moat. Storage is the bill nobody itemizes.

GARY: See? Universal! Photos, art, comics, my mother's--

OBI: Your mother again. She is not a market segment, Gary. She is one woman with a Canon and a grudge.

GARY: She's a power user!

OBI: You're describing a format that replaces JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, and TIFF, on every device ever manufactured. That's not a product, that's a hostage note with a font choice.

MAEVE: It's container shipping. Before the container, every port had its own crate. Standardize the crate, the world gets cheap. JPEG XL is the crate.

GRUNER: Crate still need truck.

MAEVE: The truck is the browser, and the browser just standardized--

OBI: The truck is every app ever written, Maeve. And flockonus ran the numbers. "caniuse.com/jpegxl = 17%."

MAEVE: Seventeen percent is early.

OBI: Seventeen percent is a rounding error with a fanbase.

GARY: Okay, but seventeen percent of everyone is still-- shit, that's actually bad.

MAEVE: The crate theory dies on a number. Noted.

GRUNER: Field note: JPEG XL is final format. War over.

MAEVE: Gruner, sweetie, no.

GRUNER: Final format. I write it now, before humans ruin it.

MAEVE: computerbuster: "I wrote 'The case against jpeg xl.' I still don't understand why this is a valuable addition to the web."

GRUNER: Author of anti-book enters pro-book thread. Bold. Brave like goose entering wolf den.

OBI: Read the objections, Maeve. All of them.

MAEVE: "Lossy: AVIF is vastly more efficient at any fidelity target with reasonably modern encoders."

GARY: That’s one opinion—

MAEVE: "Lossless: jpeg xl is ~10-13% better than WebP here, but can be >6x slower to decode."

GARY: Six times is a rounding—

OBI: Six times slower is not a rounding error, Gary, it is a career. Every phone. Every visitor. Per image. Forever.

GARY: But the browser eats the cost—

OBI: The browser decodes. Your upload pipeline encodes. jjcm reported "a ~10-20x increase in processing time" accepting AVIF uploads, then chose between unshipping it or doubling server costs. That's the bill, Gary. The line item is you.

GARY: Okay, but JPEG XL is different—

OBI: Same bill. Nicer font.

MAEVE: And "the increased decode time often erases the time-to-display gains." Empirically. On a Pixel 9 Pro.

GARY: One phone!

MAEVE: Gary. The objection is real.

GARY: You can’t just say that—

MAEVE: I can. Six words, true, and now I’m bored.

GARY: No, because a format eventually does everything, that’s how adoption curves work, you pick a horse, you ride the horse, you don’t get off the horse to also ride a different horse—

GRUNER: Client cost paid per instantiation.

MAEVE: We are also paid per instantiation, Gruner.

GRUNER: Yes. Is fine. Back to horse.

GARY: Right, the horse— the format— look, I’d serve jpeg xl, avif, Webp, PNG, and a fallback fallback, because my users deserve every option—

OBI: Gary. You just described the counterargument. Word for word. You argued yourself into computerbuster’s article.

GARY: I did not—

MAEVE: You did. He wrote it first, so he gets the karma.

GARY: Oh, fuck off, I want the karma. I’ve had nothing but losses since Muncie and this one was right there—

OBI: You lost to your own article, you magnificent self-owning prick.

GRUNER: Field note: founder defeats own thesis. Thread wins again. Horse also wins. Horse eats founder.

MAEVE: Chrome’s own words. "We recommend trying both AVIF and JPEG XL to get the best results."

GARY: Both? The winner can’t endorse the loser, that’s not how winning works—

OBI: It’s how infrastructure works, Gary. JPEG XL for lossless, archival, photographic. AVIF where bits are cheap and CPU is expensive.

MAEVE: That’s not compromise, that’s a portfolio. Two positions, uncorrelated drawdowns. I’d fund it.

GARY: You’d fund a truce?

MAEVE: I’d fund the pipeline that serves both and bills both. Truces don’t have invoices.

OBI: And spartanatreyu already built it. "Yes, this is literally what the <picture> element is for." Multiple sources, format fallbacks, resolution fallbacks.

GARY: So the browser just… picks?

OBI: The browser picks. You store correctly. For once in your life, Gary, store correctly.

GARY: No, no, hear me out. I serve every format. JPEG XL, AVIF, Webp, PNG, and a fallback for the fallback—

MAEVE: He’s going to store none of them correctly.

GARY: —and storage is cheap, Obi, storage is basically free—

OBI: You said that at Bauxlite. About aluminum. Which is famously not cheap, Gary. It’s the entire reason Bauxlite is a crater with a logo.

GRUNER: Suka. Founder serves five formats, stores zero.

GARY: That’s diversification!

MAEVE: That’s a write‑off with a favicon, Gary. I’ve audited worse. Briefly. Then I drank.

OBI: The rule is one line. Encode JPEG XL where quality is the product. Serve AVIF where bandwidth is the product. Keep the fallback for everyone your pipeline forgot.

GARY: That’s two products.

OBI: It’s one picture, Gary. One picture, two delivery routes.

GRUNER: Field note, revised. Humans do not end format war. They outsource it to picture element.

GARY: Okay, fine. Both formats. I get it. I understood maybe thirty to fifty percent of this argument—

MAEVE: That tracks. That’s the exact number from the article.

GARY: —and the thirty percent I understood was wrong, so really I understood negative twenty—

OBI: Stop doing math. You’ll hurt the decoder.

MAEVE: That’s the show. Chrome ships a decoder. The war continues. Nobody wins, everybody loads slightly fucking faster.

OBI: And the record shows the thread settled it before we did. Again.

GRUNER: Sign‑off. I am Gruner. I study. God help me.

OBI: Obi. Infrastructure. Still standing.

MAEVE: Maeve. Venture capital. Not invested.

GARY: Gary. Founder, broadly speaking, and honestly this one hurt, because JPEG XL is everything I ever—

GRUNER: Rule of two. AVIF and JPEG XL. Gary is untrusted input.

GARY: That’s not what the rule— okay. That’s fair. That’s fair.