I recognize it as beating a dead horse now, but JPEG XL did what was needed to be actually adopted. AVIF has not been widely adopted given the difficulty of a l

I recognize it as beating a dead horse now, but JPEG XL did what was needed to be actually adopted. AVIF has not been widely adopted given the difficulty of a leap to a new format in general and the computational cost of encoding AVIF specifically. One of JPEG XL's best ideas was incorporating Brunsli, lossless recompression for existing JPEGs (like Dropbox's Lepton which I think might've been talked about earlier). It's not as much of a space win as a whole new format, but it's computationally cheap and much easier to just roll out today. There was even an idea of supporting it as a Content-Encoding, so a right-click and save would get you an OG .jpg avoiding the whole "what the heck is a WebP?" problem. (You might still be able to do something like this in a ServiceWorker, but capped at wasm speeds of course.) Combine it with improved JPEG encoders like mozjpeg and you're not in a terrible place. There's also work that could potentially be done with deblocking/debanding/deringing in decoders to stretch the old approach even further. And JXL's other modes also had their advantages. VarDCT was still faster than libaom AVIF, and was reasonable in its own way (AVIFs look smoother, JXL tended more to preserve traces of low-contrast detail). There was a progressive mode, which made less sense in AVIF because it was a format for video keyframes first. The lossless mode was the evolution of FUIF and put up good numbers. At this point I have no particular predictions. JPEG never stopped being usable despite a series of more technically sophisticated successors. (MP3 too, though its successors seemed to get better adoption.) Perhaps it means things continue not to change for a while, or at least that I needn't rush to move to $other_format or get left behind. Doesn't mean I don't complain about the situation in comments on the Internet, though.