For what it is? Nothing.
Compared to something like JPEG XL? It is hands down worse in virtually all metrics.
I think this might sound like a weird thing to say, but technical superiority isn’t enough to make a convincing argument for adoption. There are plenty of things that are undeniably superior but yet the case for adoption is weak, mostly because (but not solely because) it would be difficult to adopt.
As an example, the French Republican Calendar (and the reformed calendar with 13 months) are both evidently superior to the Gregorian Calendar in terms of regularity but there is no case to argue for their adoption when the Gregorian calendar works well enough.
Another example—metric time. Also proposed as part of the metric system around the same time as it was just gaining ground, 100 seconds in a minute and 100 minutes in an hour definitely makes more sense than 60, but it would be ridiculous to say that we should devote resources into switching to it.
Final example—arithmetic in a dozenal (base-twelve) system is undeniably better than in decimal, but it would definitely not be worth the hassle to switch.
For similar reasons, I don’t find the case for JPEG XL compelling. Yes, it’s better in every metric, but when the difference comes down to a measly one or two megabytes compared to PNG and WEBP, most people really just don’t care enough. That isn’t to say that I think it’s worthless, and I do think there are valid use cases, but I doubt it will unseat PNG on the Internet.
I’m not under the impression it would unseat PNG anytime soon, but “we have a current standard” isn’t a good argument against it. As images get higher and higher quality, it’s going to increase the total size of images. And we are going to hit a point where it matters.
This sounds so much like the misquoted “640K ought to be enough for anybody” that I honestly can’t take it seriously. There’s a reason new algorithms, formats and hardware are developed and released, because they improve upon the previous and generally improve things.
You’re thinking in terms of the individual user with a handful of files.
When you look at it from a server point of view with tens of terabytes of images, or as a data center, the picture is very different.
Shaving 5 or 10% off of files is a huge deal. And that’s not even taking into account the huge leap in quality.
Soo they added webp and AV1, which aren’t that much better then old jpeg, especially with the modern jpeg encoder JpegLi. But JpegXL is out of the question.
Those examples all have a good reason that does not apply here. Browsers already support multiple formats and added a few in the last decade.
Compared to something like JPEG XL? It is hands down worse in virtually all metrics.
Only thing I can think of is that PNG is inherently lossless. Whereas JPEG XL can be lossless or lossy.
I haven’t dug into the test data or methodology myself but I read a discussion thread recently (on Reddit - /r/jpegxl/comments/l9ta2u/how_does_lossless_jpegxl_compared_to_png) - across a 200+ image test suite, the lossless compression of PNG generates files that are 162% the size of those losslessly compressed with JPEG XL.
However I also know that some tools have bad performance compressing PNG, and no certainty that those weren’t used
Honest question, does JPEG XL support lossless compression? If so, then it’s probably objectively better than PNG. My understanding with JPEG is that there was no way to actually have lossless compression, it always compressed the image at least a little.
JPEG XL supports lossless compression with a roughly 35% reduction in file size compared to PNG.
Compared to something like JPEG XL? [PNG] is hands down worse in virtually all metrics.
Until we circle back to “Jpeg XL isn’t backwards compatible with existing JPEG renderers. If it was, it’d be a winner.”
APNG, as an example, is backwards compatible with PNG.
If JPEG-XL rendered a tiny fallback JPEG (think quality 0 or even more compression) in browsers that don’t support JPEG-XL, then sites could use it without having to include a fallback option themselves.
Why are you using PNG when it’s not backwards compatible with gif? They don’t even render a small low quality gif when a browser which doesn’t support it tries to load it.
