I think one overlooked aspect is that AVIF is container based. Meaning that once sites support, when AV2, AV3 etc. will come out, there won't be a need to go through another very difficult phase of sites adoption - it will still be AVIF just with newer codec inside, and it will be just up to browsers to catch up on newer versions and newer codecs will address technical needs as times goes.

JPEG XL doesn't have that benefit, while sites adoption is arguably a worse issue than browser adoption.

To demonstrate the point even for AVIF itself - it has been in the browsers for a while. Can you use it on common sites? Good luck if you can, even major sites like GitHub and GitLab have issues with it due to some site code depending on hardcoded list of known formats or other similar problems.

Great article!

Overall I am getting that AVIF is better on the web...unless Lossless is needed, in that case better take JPEGXL.

I really hope that some day Firefox supports HDR AVIF images

Ah, Chrome ships JXL when we already have a better codec for the web!

AVIF is a lifesaver for animation with separate transparency layers so the transparency can change position frame by frame. The only other alternative is WebM which has Safari limitations.

> AVIF is basically the keyframe format of AV1 video, with a bunch of still-image-specific optimisations thrown in. Animated AVIF however, is pretty much just a repackaging of AV1 video. You can convert an AV1 MP4 to AVIF and back losslessly - it's just a container change. That's why it performs so much better, because it's built for motion.

So, is animated AVIF only keyframes / p-frames, where each frame is independent from the other? I was under that impression, uncertain if there are any other capabilities it might have (like only updating part of the canvas when only parts change, like GIF supports)

JPEG transcoding is one of the neatest features of JXL; there is so much existing jpeg out there. Eventually that may be unnecessary, but it's looking like this could already save a significant amount of space for photo archive backups for example.

Jake's interest in F1 hasn't waned, which is good to see. I am presuming that picture of an Alpine/Renault at Goodwood is his 18Mb photo, but I could be wrong. Neither has his interest im image compression waned, which is also good to see. But why the move from Google to Firefox?

I am still on webp, thinking that I am on the bleeding edge in a world where artworkers are obsessed with pixels with JPG/PNG as the only formats they know, which is an advance on GIF.

Every browser advertises what formats it will accept and if it is in 'data-saving, low bandwidth mode', so I just configure the CDN to keep the names the same '.jpg' but to send the bestest format for the situation/browser, whether that be webp or AVIF, fetching super-high resolution files from the origin server, outputting them in 'retina' resolution with none of those 'picture' elements referencing half a dozen 'responsive' sizes.

In this way nobody has to care what image format is being served, and if it is deemed that everything is way too compressed, the CDN can be flushed of the cached images, quality increased, and cache rebuilt.

It looks like I will need to update my server configuration to use JPEG XL in the usual five years' time, given the lack of any revolutionary benefit.