17 ms·

FSF Slams Google over Dropping JPEG-XL in Chrome

228 points by YakBizzarro 4y ago

samwillis 4y ago
> While we can't link to Google's issue tracker directly because of another freedom issue -- its use of nonfree JavaScript -- we're told ... While there may be genuinely good arguments for keeping JPEG-XL, I cannot take seriously the arguments of an organisation that cuts itself off from the rest of the world for such silly reasons. Edit: Google's argument that there wasn't enough interest is equally impossible to take seriously when it was always behind an optional flag. No web devs are going to invest time in developing JPEG-XL functionality until their users can actually use it.
- principles1 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - jmull 4y ago
    Do you really think an insult is the right rebuttal? (Also, the insult is baseless, since the previous poster may have strong principles, even if they aren’t the same as yours.)
    - skissane 4y ago
      New account whose first comment is flamewar-style insult-no point engaging with them, they clearly aren’t here for constructive discussion, just flag and move on. With enough flags it will go dead (Can everyone flag comments? Or is there some minimum karma for it? I forget.)
      - z500 4y ago
        Seems the minimum karma limit is at least 4.
  - anotherhue 4y ago
    The keyboard you used to type this likely lacks open firmware.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  If Google's website is designed in the fashion where none of the content is available statically and the only way to access it is via running a blob of intrusive code, I can understand their sentiment. I would love people to stop linking, and posting links, to e.g. Facebook because the only thing it would show me is "you have to register to view this".
  - politelemon 4y ago
    If non-intrusive browsers existed, which could run Javascript, is that considered acceptable to go to JS sites? eg what about Firefox or its derivatives?
    - chomp 4y ago
      No. The objection to linking to sites with JS is that they contain nonfree JS blobs that spy on you, run unknown obfuscated code, and are not open to modification, because they’re almost always obfuscated.
      - Eduard 4y ago
        Still silly, because whoever cares about that stance can just visit the site with (requests for) Javascript disabled.
        jraph 4y ago
        Chromium bug tracker doesn't work with Javascript disabled.
        Eduard 4y ago
        okay, I appreciate your reply. Even so, linking to the issue is helpful, including JavaScript disablers.
        jraph 4y ago
- guilhas 4y ago
  I agree with the FSF principles. But they could add a picture, or a link to an archive site that strips most JS. To avoid users having to go and open the real thing to see it
  - tedunangst 4y ago
    But then they themselves may have to read the source material, instead of relying on a vague "we're told" that may or may not be true.
- neilv 4y ago
  Unfortunately, I think this is a phenomenon with the FSF... They want to raise a point X, which could in theory be communicated in a persuasive way. But they can't resist also mentioning their zero-tolerance on unrelated point Y. I think the Y makes people tend to go WTF, and then dismiss both X and Y. Every time now, I'm thinking "You don't have to always mention Y!" On at least a couple occasions, I actually abandoned an argument I was making on some X in a venue, because some FSF person jumped in with a Y. If I didn't know they were a true-believer in Y and at least sympathetic to X, I'd think they were trying to discredit both. The FSF has some great principles, but a lot of the communications don't seem to be calibrated for me, nor for my understanding of anyone else.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    FSF is the uncompromising idealist for better and for worse. It takes some serious balls to live life the way RMS does, fetching HTML by sending email and all that. No one else wants to be that extreme, so even though they value computing freedom in the abstract they compromise and tolerate little injustices in the name of getting things done. At the end of the day RMS is still right though. Those little injustices add up, the corporations creep up on you slowly and next thing you know you're being surveilled by the javascript you used to see as harmless, and soon you learn how to tolerate that too. Dude saw ridiculously far into the future even decades ago but it doesn't matter because stuff like RYF certification is irrelevant and will only ever apply to machines that must 20 years old by now because manufacturers don't care and everyone is on mobile now anyway.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      That's assuming RMS isn't just LARPing.
    - grumbel 4y ago
      The Javascript issue never made sense to me. You are reading a non-free document to begin with, what difference does it make if it is running Javascript or not? If they wanna spy on you they can do that with HTML and CSS just as well. Even releasing the spying software under GPL wouldn't stop it from spying on you. The party one should be angry about here is the browser, which provides little to no tools to show the user what is going on and provides no real means to stop it. This is quite a bit different from the early web days when every browser had a "Javascript off" and style sheet selector right in the main menu by default. > Dude saw ridiculously far into the future even decades ago Not far enough. Ever since the whole world moved to "software as a service" and your computer has become little more than a thin terminal to some Google/Facebook/whatever-service FSF started to feel quite out of touch. Sure, they tell you "don't do that", but while that isn't wrong, it's not exactly helpful either. Many service simply have to run on a computer that you don't own and we need rules to govern that. None of the Free Software licenses help here. FSF never bothered to create any kind of licenses or best practices that deal with how those services should work. They are stuck in dealing with software freedom problems of the 90s, not the problems we face today. Luckily we do have the GDPR now, but the FSF had nothing to do with that and never provided anything similar.
- kps 4y ago
  Chromium's issue tracker appears to be open source, under the same BSD-type license as the core browser. https://chromium.googlesource.com/infra/infra/+/refs/heads/main/appengine/monorail/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/infra/infra/+/refs/heads/m... The deployment references google-analytics, but everyone already blocks that, right?
- jacooper 4y ago
  And that exact mindset made them totally irrelevant in the real world. The FSFE and other organizations like the EFF and the EDRI are much more relevant and have a bigger impact than an org which still insists on using devices from 2007
- rightbyte 4y ago
  > I cannot take seriously the arguments of an organisation that cuts itself off from the rest of the world for such silly reasons. Why would they risk unsuspecting visitors running Google code on their computer? It is a spyware company. There is nothing silly about not wanting to link to Google. Maybe futile given their market domination. But not silly.
Y_Y 4y ago
While I'm aligned with the FSF in most things, I'm happy to link to a bug tracker despite its shitty JS. https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/4081749 https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/40... Maybe they're sour about webp not obseleting all other formats by now?
- rippercushions 4y ago
  That's the pull request, the actual discussion is in this bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1178058#c183 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805... And apparently JPEG XL, which was only added in 2021, will be supported again from Chrome 117 onward.
  - mef 4y ago
    is there any evidence for this other than this tweet?
  - samwillis 4y ago
    > will be supported again from Chrome 117 That appears to have been an April 1st joke: https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1642039947719745537?t=HV1TA90KMykEXrXyYtJj2A https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1642039947719745537?t=...
  - ninepoints 4y ago
    That was an april fool's joke
threeseed 4y ago
To save people some clicks here are the two discussions: * https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/WjCKcBw219k/m/xX-NnWtTBQAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/WjCKc... * https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1178058#c183 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...
Someone1234 4y ago
This is worth looking at: https://caniuse.com/jpegxl https://caniuse.com/jpegxl Unless I'm misunderstanding that, no browser actually ever supported JPEG-XL without a flag (or at all on Safari's cases). No OS appears to have supported it natively either[0]. The reality is that formats have a chicken & egg problem. Normally Google deserves to get dunked on, but in this case, why is Google the scapegoat instead of the entire industry that didn't adopt it? Feels like there is a bigger issue with JPEG-XL's failure to launch, and they did more than some (Apple? Microsoft?). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL#Industry_support_and_adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL#Industry_support_and_a...
- brookst 4y ago
  Yep. This is like teenagers blaming Walmart for their band's lack of success. "If only they had carried our album and featured it on endcaps!"
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    Yep, teenagers like Facebook and Adobe - oh wait. Maybe Google is now flexing its anticompetitive muscles now, isn't it?
    - brookst 4y ago
      I must be failing to understand your comment. The people complaining are FSF, and no matter how hard I squint, I cannot see how fair competition could require Google to be the first one to support a standard that literally nobody else supports.
      - zinekeller 4y ago
        > The people complaining are FSF Nope, not just FSF. The Chromium team have prototyped JXL, but removed it initially for unknown reasons (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1178058#c183 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...). Engineering teams including but not limited to Adobe, Facebook, Intel and Shopify have complained about its abrupt removal. Chromium developers have subsequently said that it was "due to low interest" (despite piles of messages from engineering teams both in leading companies and small groups saying otherwise). > I cannot see how fair competition could require Google to be the first one to support a standard that literally nobody else supports. First, Adobe products have just included JXL. Second, It's because Google is pushing for AVIF, which was extended from AV1. While it has some advantages (as essentially extended version from AV1), it also has a lot of disadvantages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590516. No one said to remove AVIF in favor of JXL and in fact there are instances where AVIF is the better choice (animated images due to its interframe support) but instead to support JXL regardless of Google's support of AVIF, and some people have seen it as forcing Google-favored AVIF instead of considering all formats developed (like how WebP was rammed a decade ago).
Jyaif 4y ago
In this case, Google should be applauded for not pushing down everyone's throat a new image format they created.
- chomp 4y ago
  Ehhh not quite. Google has some technology in JPEG-XL, but theirs isn’t the only in the project, there’s other code too, plus the JPEG group’s development, and it’s an ISO standard. WebP is just flat out a Google thing, no standards body other than Google.
  - Jyaif 4y ago
    I see. Thank you!
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    The article is about avif not webp. Note the editors (past and present) for the AOM avif specification don't even include Google https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/ https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/ Google was involved in each format but not responsible for on in control of either.
  - Jyaif 4y ago
    Out of the top 6 contributors of jpeg-xl, just one is not from Google. source: https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/graphs/contributors https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/graphs/contributors
csdreamer7 4y ago
One of the most interesting things to me is that JPEG-XL is under an open Patent License, unlike the original JPEG. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL Also, Google contributed quite a bit to it's development. As the patent grants show: https://github.com/ImageMagick/jpeg-xl/blob/main/PATENTS https://github.com/ImageMagick/jpeg-xl/blob/main/PATENTS https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/blob/main/PATENTS https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/blob/main/PATENTS Microsoft seemed to have gotten a patent on part of it's implementation (which Google also tried to get). Not sure if Google will pay to invalidate that patent, but I have a feeling they are more likely to defend AVIF. https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/ Google's control is a little concerning, but I do feel there are bigger fish to fry then choosing between two free formats. A bigger concern is the H.264 and H.265 patents domination of video.
- rwmj 4y ago
  But surely JPEG is patent free by now (having been invented in the very early 90s)? To be honest I'm confused about what FSF's argument is here, as JPEG seems just fine to me.
  - csdreamer7 4y ago
    Yes, the original JPEG is patent free now. The point of my comparison was between the times that both of them were seeking adoption.
  - Beldin 4y ago
    I don't know what the FSF's argument is. I personally don't feel very strongly yet about this, but I am not comfortable with the "JPEG is sufficient" line of reasoning. I don't know what the world could look like if a much-improved image format was common, but I don't think I'll see that future as long as the browser with 90% market share doesn't support that new format.
xoa 4y ago
So a few dozen comments, but so far it doesn't look like any mention the immediate thing that jumped out at me which was the claims vs AVIF: >"In turn, what users will be given is yet another facet of the web that Google itself controls: the AVIF format." Huh? I'll admit I haven't been following codecs as super ultra closely as I used to, but I thought AOM was a pretty broad coalition of varying interests and AV1 an open, royalty free codec that was plenty open source friendly? I've heard plenty of reasonable arguments that JPEG XL has some real technical advantages over AVIF and as well as superior performance is much more feature rich and scalable. So I could see people being bummed for that. But this is the first time I've heard the assertion that it's somehow a Google project? I mean, AOM's libavif reference is BSD too [0]? I'd love some more details on that from anyone who has been following this more closely. I can even understand if AOM isn't as community friendly and an accusation that it's dominated by big corps, but in that case why single out Google alone? From wiki: >The governing members of the Alliance for Open Media are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent. Like, Google is certainly significant, but that's a lot of equally heavy hitters. And interesting that Mozilla is there too. ---- 0: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Like, Google is certainly significant, but that's a lot of equally heavy hitters. And interesting that Mozilla is there too. Mozilla is a dependent of Google's. The thing that stands out about that list is that aside from Google and Facebook (who completely control their markets), the New Microsoft and the aforementioned Mozilla, most of these companies are notoriously openly hostile to anything open.
  - jerryX 4y ago
    In practice AVIF is made practically only by Google team. Good summary from https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1383056-fsf-slams-google-over-dropping-jpeg-xl-in-chrome https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoron... : Max image size is limited to 4K (3840x2160) in AVIF, which is a deal breaker to me. You can tile images, but seams are visible at the edges, which makes this unusable. JPEG XL supports image sizes of up to 1,073,741,823x1,073,741,824. You won’t run out of image space anytime soon. JXL offers lossless recompression of JPEG images. This is important for compatibility, as you can re-encode JPEG images into JXL for a 30% reduction in file size for free. AVIF has no such feature. JXL has a maximum of 32 bits per channel. AVIF supports up to 10. JXL is more resilient to generation loss.5 JXL supports progressive decoding, which is essential in web delivery, IMO. AVIF has no such feature. AVIF is notoriously based on the AV1 video encoder. That makes it far superior for animated image sequences, outperforming JXL in this department by a wide margin. However, JXL also supports this feature. AVIF is supported in most major browsers. This includes Chrome (and derivatives) and Firefox (and forks). JXL is supported by almost nobody right now. Only Thorium, Pale Moon, LibreWolf, Waterfox, Basilisk and Firefox Nightly incorporate it. Most of these are community-maintained forks of Firefox. That is a big downside for adoption, as I already ranted about in this post. Both formats support transparency and wide gamut (HDR).
teddyh 4y ago
Actual link: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/googles-decision-to-deprecate-jpeg-xl-emphasizes-the-need-for-browser-choice-and-free-formats https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/googles-decision-to-depr...
jeroenhd 4y ago
Google removes a standard nobody uses, I don't see the problem. AVIF is a decent alternative that can actually be used in modern browsers, with WebP as a fallback. We've got plenty of open image formats for the web already. I don't get why people get so hung up about JPEG XL, it's not as if they're trying to force HEIF onto you like some other tech companies do.
- vehemenz 4y ago
  The same reasoning could have applied to AVIF and WebP a few years ago. Nobody used these formats back then, so what's the problem if Google discontinues them?
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    There was a long period between the jpg/png/gif era and free alternatives that were significantly better but could replace all three format use cases (really 4, if you count that they were just a special format of the video codec they introduced). Even between webp and avif there was about a decade gap. Despite this jpg/png/gif aren't really gone and at the same time jpegxl is a one off codec for images. Mozilla didn't see the rush to introduce another format either but the FSF article isn't going to talk about that. Jpegxl definitely has some cool stuff about it and from the technical side I love it but from the "god damn it why isn't this saved image working this time" perspective I'm not angry at all to the browsers for not supporting it. Hell I'm still waiting for Microsoft to feel ready to enable AVIF in Edge when they had an employee as an editor for the standard.
- bick_nyers 4y ago
  No one used it because they were waiting for it to not be behind a development flag in Chrome etc. My backend had the code written and ready to go, just waiting...
devinprater 4y ago
FSF slams Google? Do they even have enough power to slap companies on the wrist anymore?
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  “Slammed” is a word journalists love to use for when one entity criticizes another, regardless of impact or severity. It’s a trope that seems to have been around for a long time.
ifeeltriedboss 4y ago
Google is so SLAMMED now
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  Yeah Look how FSF slammed Apple in the past for their iPod ecosystem with “defective by design”. Apple never recovered from that
- grapesurgeon 4y ago
  [dead]
iambateman 4y ago
I mean…it’s a PR issue more than anything. I know what webp is and I had never heard of jpeg-xl. I think that’s true for a lot of people. Maybe one of them is better, but webp definitely has a distribution advantage by a mile.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zamadatix 4y ago
Discussion about the root article from FSF: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35554107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35554107 Similar discussions when Chrome/Mozilla were removing it: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563378 (dang's comment has a list of additional related at the time) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33803941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33803941 Relevant discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212522 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33442281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33442281 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35018672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35018672
CharlesW 4y ago
All of the people here who are so passionate about JPEG-XL will be happy to learn that there's nothing preventing them from using it on their sites right now: https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js If you want Chrome to ship with JPEG-XL support, use it. At some point, browser makers will decide it's worth the incremental cost (to them and all users) to add it.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  A bundling approach works great for web apps (e.g. an online image editor) but for serving images you have to be willing to not only lose any of the size and speed benefits but to completely demolish your website's performance all in hopes one day enough sites agree to do the same.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    If the advantages of JPEG-XL are not worth websites downloading ~300KB (the size of 1 or 2 "hero" images) to users, one could argue that browser makers shouldn't add it to every download of their browser in perpetuity.
    - zamadatix 4y ago
      To be clear I'm not a fan of adding JPEG-XL to browsers rather I think you're presenting a strawman for why. Even if the size overhead were 0 bytes you're still completely ignoring the project page says it takes ~0.8 seconds (~0.5 multithreaded) to load 0.2 kilobyte image files with nothing else going on. An infinitely better format wouldn't make sense to a lot of sites. That is to say people excited about JPEG-XL being removed aren't simply just ignorant they could decode it via JavaScript/WASM. Mostly they seem to disagree on what "enough improvement" to outweigh the cost of a shipping a new format is. E.g. Cloudinary is a commonly referenced proponent not by chance but because they operate a media CDN and it makes sense for them to present lots of material about the advantages vs say a single site.
      - 4y ago
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
Mozilla had the same issue - it was one engineer who stubbornly kept webp support out of the browser for years. Then he quit or got laid off and Mozilla finally got support. Mozilla also refused to support Yubikey for years, which we are still paying for now. It seems to me like Mozilla forgot really quickly what life was like when Internet Explorer was the dominant browser. Half the reason Chrome can ignore community outrage is because Mozilla decided existing options were "good enough" and stopped being competition. That said though, that FSF guy is nuts. He can't link to their bug tracker because it uses Javascript? I think that battle is lost. But he did obviously read the tracker, does this mean he has to remove his tinfoil hat and go bathe in the living waters of Richard Stallman's bathtub?
- quadrangle 4y ago
  Maybe you misread or misunderstood (although maybe it makes no difference to you), but the specific issue is: the FSF won't link to the bug tracker (not can't) because of proprietary Javascript. The FSF has no absolute rejection of JS, they just are purist about the JS being free software. And it wasn't a personal post by an "FSF guy", it's the stance of the whole FSF organization. Yes, the battle is lost. Fighting an effectively lost battle isn't necessarily nuts, but criticizing it is quite understandable.
bunbun69 4y ago
I thought HackerNews and Reddit hated words such as “slams” in the title. Guess it’s okay now because we love FSF and Phoronix
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  It's in the article's headline. HN would rather keep the original title if possible.
  - debugnik 4y ago
    And yet HN automatically amputates title patterns that the mods consider clickbait, even if most of the time it just makes the title unintelligible or misleading.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

228 points by YakBizzarro 4y ago

> While we can't link to Google's issue tracker directly because of another freedom issue -- its use of nonfree JavaScript -- we're told ... While there may be genuinely good arguments for keeping JPEG-XL, I cannot take seriously the arguments of an organisation that cuts itself off from the rest of the world for such silly reasons. Edit: Google's argument that there wasn't enough interest is equally impossible to take seriously when it was always behind an optional flag. No web devs are going to invest time in developing JPEG-XL functionality until their users can actually use it.

principles1 4y ago
[flagged]
- jmull 4y ago
  Do you really think an insult is the right rebuttal? (Also, the insult is baseless, since the previous poster may have strong principles, even if they aren’t the same as yours.)
  - skissane 4y ago
    New account whose first comment is flamewar-style insult-no point engaging with them, they clearly aren’t here for constructive discussion, just flag and move on. With enough flags it will go dead (Can everyone flag comments? Or is there some minimum karma for it? I forget.)
    - z500 4y ago
      Seems the minimum karma limit is at least 4.
- anotherhue 4y ago
  The keyboard you used to type this likely lacks open firmware.
thriftwy 4y ago
If Google's website is designed in the fashion where none of the content is available statically and the only way to access it is via running a blob of intrusive code, I can understand their sentiment. I would love people to stop linking, and posting links, to e.g. Facebook because the only thing it would show me is "you have to register to view this".
- politelemon 4y ago
  If non-intrusive browsers existed, which could run Javascript, is that considered acceptable to go to JS sites? eg what about Firefox or its derivatives?
  - chomp 4y ago
    No. The objection to linking to sites with JS is that they contain nonfree JS blobs that spy on you, run unknown obfuscated code, and are not open to modification, because they’re almost always obfuscated.
    - Eduard 4y ago
      Still silly, because whoever cares about that stance can just visit the site with (requests for) Javascript disabled.
      - jraph 4y ago
        Chromium bug tracker doesn't work with Javascript disabled.
        Eduard 4y ago
        okay, I appreciate your reply. Even so, linking to the issue is helpful, including JavaScript disablers.
        jraph 4y ago
guilhas 4y ago
I agree with the FSF principles. But they could add a picture, or a link to an archive site that strips most JS. To avoid users having to go and open the real thing to see it
- tedunangst 4y ago
  But then they themselves may have to read the source material, instead of relying on a vague "we're told" that may or may not be true.
neilv 4y ago
Unfortunately, I think this is a phenomenon with the FSF... They want to raise a point X, which could in theory be communicated in a persuasive way. But they can't resist also mentioning their zero-tolerance on unrelated point Y. I think the Y makes people tend to go WTF, and then dismiss both X and Y. Every time now, I'm thinking "You don't have to always mention Y!" On at least a couple occasions, I actually abandoned an argument I was making on some X in a venue, because some FSF person jumped in with a Y. If I didn't know they were a true-believer in Y and at least sympathetic to X, I'd think they were trying to discredit both. The FSF has some great principles, but a lot of the communications don't seem to be calibrated for me, nor for my understanding of anyone else.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  FSF is the uncompromising idealist for better and for worse. It takes some serious balls to live life the way RMS does, fetching HTML by sending email and all that. No one else wants to be that extreme, so even though they value computing freedom in the abstract they compromise and tolerate little injustices in the name of getting things done. At the end of the day RMS is still right though. Those little injustices add up, the corporations creep up on you slowly and next thing you know you're being surveilled by the javascript you used to see as harmless, and soon you learn how to tolerate that too. Dude saw ridiculously far into the future even decades ago but it doesn't matter because stuff like RYF certification is irrelevant and will only ever apply to machines that must 20 years old by now because manufacturers don't care and everyone is on mobile now anyway.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    That's assuming RMS isn't just LARPing.
  - grumbel 4y ago
    The Javascript issue never made sense to me. You are reading a non-free document to begin with, what difference does it make if it is running Javascript or not? If they wanna spy on you they can do that with HTML and CSS just as well. Even releasing the spying software under GPL wouldn't stop it from spying on you. The party one should be angry about here is the browser, which provides little to no tools to show the user what is going on and provides no real means to stop it. This is quite a bit different from the early web days when every browser had a "Javascript off" and style sheet selector right in the main menu by default. > Dude saw ridiculously far into the future even decades ago Not far enough. Ever since the whole world moved to "software as a service" and your computer has become little more than a thin terminal to some Google/Facebook/whatever-service FSF started to feel quite out of touch. Sure, they tell you "don't do that", but while that isn't wrong, it's not exactly helpful either. Many service simply have to run on a computer that you don't own and we need rules to govern that. None of the Free Software licenses help here. FSF never bothered to create any kind of licenses or best practices that deal with how those services should work. They are stuck in dealing with software freedom problems of the 90s, not the problems we face today. Luckily we do have the GDPR now, but the FSF had nothing to do with that and never provided anything similar.
kps 4y ago
Chromium's issue tracker appears to be open source, under the same BSD-type license as the core browser. https://chromium.googlesource.com/infra/infra/+/refs/heads/main/appengine/monorail/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/infra/infra/+/refs/heads/m... The deployment references google-analytics, but everyone already blocks that, right?
jacooper 4y ago
And that exact mindset made them totally irrelevant in the real world. The FSFE and other organizations like the EFF and the EDRI are much more relevant and have a bigger impact than an org which still insists on using devices from 2007
rightbyte 4y ago
> I cannot take seriously the arguments of an organisation that cuts itself off from the rest of the world for such silly reasons. Why would they risk unsuspecting visitors running Google code on their computer? It is a spyware company. There is nothing silly about not wanting to link to Google. Maybe futile given their market domination. But not silly.

Y_Y 4y ago

While I'm aligned with the FSF in most things, I'm happy to link to a bug tracker despite its shitty JS. https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/4081749 https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/40... Maybe they're sour about webp not obseleting all other formats by now?

rippercushions 4y ago
That's the pull request, the actual discussion is in this bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1178058#c183 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805... And apparently JPEG XL, which was only added in 2021, will be supported again from Chrome 117 onward.
- mef 4y ago
  is there any evidence for this other than this tweet?
- samwillis 4y ago
  > will be supported again from Chrome 117 That appears to have been an April 1st joke: https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1642039947719745537?t=HV1TA90KMykEXrXyYtJj2A https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1642039947719745537?t=...
- ninepoints 4y ago
  That was an april fool's joke

threeseed 4y ago

To save people some clicks here are the two discussions: * https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/WjCKcBw219k/m/xX-NnWtTBQAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/WjCKc... * https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1178058#c183 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...

Someone1234 4y ago

This is worth looking at: https://caniuse.com/jpegxl https://caniuse.com/jpegxl Unless I'm misunderstanding that, no browser actually ever supported JPEG-XL without a flag (or at all on Safari's cases). No OS appears to have supported it natively either[0]. The reality is that formats have a chicken & egg problem. Normally Google deserves to get dunked on, but in this case, why is Google the scapegoat instead of the entire industry that didn't adopt it? Feels like there is a bigger issue with JPEG-XL's failure to launch, and they did more than some (Apple? Microsoft?). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL#Industry_support_and_adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL#Industry_support_and_a...

brookst 4y ago
Yep. This is like teenagers blaming Walmart for their band's lack of success. "If only they had carried our album and featured it on endcaps!"
- zinekeller 4y ago
  Yep, teenagers like Facebook and Adobe - oh wait. Maybe Google is now flexing its anticompetitive muscles now, isn't it?
  - brookst 4y ago
    I must be failing to understand your comment. The people complaining are FSF, and no matter how hard I squint, I cannot see how fair competition could require Google to be the first one to support a standard that literally nobody else supports.
    - zinekeller 4y ago
      > The people complaining are FSF Nope, not just FSF. The Chromium team have prototyped JXL, but removed it initially for unknown reasons (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1178058#c183 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...). Engineering teams including but not limited to Adobe, Facebook, Intel and Shopify have complained about its abrupt removal. Chromium developers have subsequently said that it was "due to low interest" (despite piles of messages from engineering teams both in leading companies and small groups saying otherwise). > I cannot see how fair competition could require Google to be the first one to support a standard that literally nobody else supports. First, Adobe products have just included JXL. Second, It's because Google is pushing for AVIF, which was extended from AV1. While it has some advantages (as essentially extended version from AV1), it also has a lot of disadvantages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590516. No one said to remove AVIF in favor of JXL and in fact there are instances where AVIF is the better choice (animated images due to its interframe support) but instead to support JXL regardless of Google's support of AVIF, and some people have seen it as forcing Google-favored AVIF instead of considering all formats developed (like how WebP was rammed a decade ago).

Jyaif 4y ago

In this case, Google should be applauded for not pushing down everyone's throat a new image format they created.

chomp 4y ago
Ehhh not quite. Google has some technology in JPEG-XL, but theirs isn’t the only in the project, there’s other code too, plus the JPEG group’s development, and it’s an ISO standard. WebP is just flat out a Google thing, no standards body other than Google.
- Jyaif 4y ago
  I see. Thank you!
- zamadatix 4y ago
  The article is about avif not webp. Note the editors (past and present) for the AOM avif specification don't even include Google https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/ https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/ Google was involved in each format but not responsible for on in control of either.
- Jyaif 4y ago
  Out of the top 6 contributors of jpeg-xl, just one is not from Google. source: https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/graphs/contributors https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/graphs/contributors

csdreamer7 4y ago

One of the most interesting things to me is that JPEG-XL is under an open Patent License, unlike the original JPEG. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL Also, Google contributed quite a bit to it's development. As the patent grants show: https://github.com/ImageMagick/jpeg-xl/blob/main/PATENTS https://github.com/ImageMagick/jpeg-xl/blob/main/PATENTS https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/blob/main/PATENTS https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/blob/main/PATENTS Microsoft seemed to have gotten a patent on part of it's implementation (which Google also tried to get). Not sure if Google will pay to invalidate that patent, but I have a feeling they are more likely to defend AVIF. https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/ Google's control is a little concerning, but I do feel there are bigger fish to fry then choosing between two free formats. A bigger concern is the H.264 and H.265 patents domination of video.

rwmj 4y ago
But surely JPEG is patent free by now (having been invented in the very early 90s)? To be honest I'm confused about what FSF's argument is here, as JPEG seems just fine to me.
- csdreamer7 4y ago
  Yes, the original JPEG is patent free now. The point of my comparison was between the times that both of them were seeking adoption.
- Beldin 4y ago
  I don't know what the FSF's argument is. I personally don't feel very strongly yet about this, but I am not comfortable with the "JPEG is sufficient" line of reasoning. I don't know what the world could look like if a much-improved image format was common, but I don't think I'll see that future as long as the browser with 90% market share doesn't support that new format.

xoa 4y ago

So a few dozen comments, but so far it doesn't look like any mention the immediate thing that jumped out at me which was the claims vs AVIF: >"In turn, what users will be given is yet another facet of the web that Google itself controls: the AVIF format." Huh? I'll admit I haven't been following codecs as super ultra closely as I used to, but I thought AOM was a pretty broad coalition of varying interests and AV1 an open, royalty free codec that was plenty open source friendly? I've heard plenty of reasonable arguments that JPEG XL has some real technical advantages over AVIF and as well as superior performance is much more feature rich and scalable. So I could see people being bummed for that. But this is the first time I've heard the assertion that it's somehow a Google project? I mean, AOM's libavif reference is BSD too [0]? I'd love some more details on that from anyone who has been following this more closely. I can even understand if AOM isn't as community friendly and an accusation that it's dominated by big corps, but in that case why single out Google alone? From wiki: >The governing members of the Alliance for Open Media are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent. Like, Google is certainly significant, but that's a lot of equally heavy hitters. And interesting that Mozilla is there too. ---- 0: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif

pessimizer 4y ago
> Like, Google is certainly significant, but that's a lot of equally heavy hitters. And interesting that Mozilla is there too. Mozilla is a dependent of Google's. The thing that stands out about that list is that aside from Google and Facebook (who completely control their markets), the New Microsoft and the aforementioned Mozilla, most of these companies are notoriously openly hostile to anything open.
- jerryX 4y ago
  In practice AVIF is made practically only by Google team. Good summary from https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1383056-fsf-slams-google-over-dropping-jpeg-xl-in-chrome https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoron... : Max image size is limited to 4K (3840x2160) in AVIF, which is a deal breaker to me. You can tile images, but seams are visible at the edges, which makes this unusable. JPEG XL supports image sizes of up to 1,073,741,823x1,073,741,824. You won’t run out of image space anytime soon. JXL offers lossless recompression of JPEG images. This is important for compatibility, as you can re-encode JPEG images into JXL for a 30% reduction in file size for free. AVIF has no such feature. JXL has a maximum of 32 bits per channel. AVIF supports up to 10. JXL is more resilient to generation loss.5 JXL supports progressive decoding, which is essential in web delivery, IMO. AVIF has no such feature. AVIF is notoriously based on the AV1 video encoder. That makes it far superior for animated image sequences, outperforming JXL in this department by a wide margin. However, JXL also supports this feature. AVIF is supported in most major browsers. This includes Chrome (and derivatives) and Firefox (and forks). JXL is supported by almost nobody right now. Only Thorium, Pale Moon, LibreWolf, Waterfox, Basilisk and Firefox Nightly incorporate it. Most of these are community-maintained forks of Firefox. That is a big downside for adoption, as I already ranted about in this post. Both formats support transparency and wide gamut (HDR).

teddyh 4y ago

Actual link: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/googles-decision-to-deprecate-jpeg-xl-emphasizes-the-need-for-browser-choice-and-free-formats https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/googles-decision-to-depr...

jeroenhd 4y ago

Google removes a standard nobody uses, I don't see the problem. AVIF is a decent alternative that can actually be used in modern browsers, with WebP as a fallback. We've got plenty of open image formats for the web already. I don't get why people get so hung up about JPEG XL, it's not as if they're trying to force HEIF onto you like some other tech companies do.

vehemenz 4y ago
The same reasoning could have applied to AVIF and WebP a few years ago. Nobody used these formats back then, so what's the problem if Google discontinues them?
- zamadatix 4y ago
  There was a long period between the jpg/png/gif era and free alternatives that were significantly better but could replace all three format use cases (really 4, if you count that they were just a special format of the video codec they introduced). Even between webp and avif there was about a decade gap. Despite this jpg/png/gif aren't really gone and at the same time jpegxl is a one off codec for images. Mozilla didn't see the rush to introduce another format either but the FSF article isn't going to talk about that. Jpegxl definitely has some cool stuff about it and from the technical side I love it but from the "god damn it why isn't this saved image working this time" perspective I'm not angry at all to the browsers for not supporting it. Hell I'm still waiting for Microsoft to feel ready to enable AVIF in Edge when they had an employee as an editor for the standard.
bick_nyers 4y ago
No one used it because they were waiting for it to not be behind a development flag in Chrome etc. My backend had the code written and ready to go, just waiting...

devinprater 4y ago

FSF slams Google? Do they even have enough power to slap companies on the wrist anymore?

BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
“Slammed” is a word journalists love to use for when one entity criticizes another, regardless of impact or severity. It’s a trope that seems to have been around for a long time.

ifeeltriedboss 4y ago

Google is so SLAMMED now

shp0ngle 4y ago
Yeah Look how FSF slammed Apple in the past for their iPod ecosystem with “defective by design”. Apple never recovered from that
grapesurgeon 4y ago
[dead]

iambateman 4y ago

I mean…it’s a PR issue more than anything. I know what webp is and I had never heard of jpeg-xl. I think that’s true for a lot of people. Maybe one of them is better, but webp definitely has a distribution advantage by a mile.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

zamadatix 4y ago

Discussion about the root article from FSF: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35554107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35554107 Similar discussions when Chrome/Mozilla were removing it: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563378 (dang's comment has a list of additional related at the time) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33803941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33803941 Relevant discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212522 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33442281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33442281 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35018672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35018672

CharlesW 4y ago

All of the people here who are so passionate about JPEG-XL will be happy to learn that there's nothing preventing them from using it on their sites right now: https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js If you want Chrome to ship with JPEG-XL support, use it. At some point, browser makers will decide it's worth the incremental cost (to them and all users) to add it.

zamadatix 4y ago
A bundling approach works great for web apps (e.g. an online image editor) but for serving images you have to be willing to not only lose any of the size and speed benefits but to completely demolish your website's performance all in hopes one day enough sites agree to do the same.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  If the advantages of JPEG-XL are not worth websites downloading ~300KB (the size of 1 or 2 "hero" images) to users, one could argue that browser makers shouldn't add it to every download of their browser in perpetuity.
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    To be clear I'm not a fan of adding JPEG-XL to browsers rather I think you're presenting a strawman for why. Even if the size overhead were 0 bytes you're still completely ignoring the project page says it takes ~0.8 seconds (~0.5 multithreaded) to load 0.2 kilobyte image files with nothing else going on. An infinitely better format wouldn't make sense to a lot of sites. That is to say people excited about JPEG-XL being removed aren't simply just ignorant they could decode it via JavaScript/WASM. Mostly they seem to disagree on what "enough improvement" to outweigh the cost of a shipping a new format is. E.g. Cloudinary is a commonly referenced proponent not by chance but because they operate a media CDN and it makes sense for them to present lots of material about the advantages vs say a single site.
    - 4y ago

zxcvbn4038 4y ago

Mozilla had the same issue - it was one engineer who stubbornly kept webp support out of the browser for years. Then he quit or got laid off and Mozilla finally got support. Mozilla also refused to support Yubikey for years, which we are still paying for now. It seems to me like Mozilla forgot really quickly what life was like when Internet Explorer was the dominant browser. Half the reason Chrome can ignore community outrage is because Mozilla decided existing options were "good enough" and stopped being competition. That said though, that FSF guy is nuts. He can't link to their bug tracker because it uses Javascript? I think that battle is lost. But he did obviously read the tracker, does this mean he has to remove his tinfoil hat and go bathe in the living waters of Richard Stallman's bathtub?

quadrangle 4y ago
Maybe you misread or misunderstood (although maybe it makes no difference to you), but the specific issue is: the FSF won't link to the bug tracker (not can't) because of proprietary Javascript. The FSF has no absolute rejection of JS, they just are purist about the JS being free software. And it wasn't a personal post by an "FSF guy", it's the stance of the whole FSF organization. Yes, the battle is lost. Fighting an effectively lost battle isn't necessarily nuts, but criticizing it is quite understandable.

bunbun69 4y ago

I thought HackerNews and Reddit hated words such as “slams” in the title. Guess it’s okay now because we love FSF and Phoronix

theandrewbailey 4y ago
It's in the article's headline. HN would rather keep the original title if possible.
- debugnik 4y ago
  And yet HN automatically amputates title patterns that the mods consider clickbait, even if most of the time it just makes the title unintelligible or misleading.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]