"Desperate times call for desperate measures."
Hamas and the Israeli regime have in common that they justify their own unjustifiable, inhumane actions by pointing to the unjustifiable, inhumane actions of the other side, leading to a vicious cycle of desperation. Although it is linguistically perhaps not so clear in English, the only antidote for desperation is HOPE. Hope is the optimistic, constructive feeling that we can work together to build a better world, a world of peace, freedom, solidarity and social justice.

So the Chrome team (or is it the AVIF team? I am a bit confused now) finally released the data that was the basis for the decision to remove JPEG XL support in Chrome. Here it is:
storage.googleapis.com/avif-compariso… It would be good if all people with experience in image compression take a closer look at this data and perhaps try to reproduce it. I will certainly do the same. I will perhaps already give some initial remarks/impressions.

@laughinghan @atax1a @atomicthumbs Video codec intra frame from today is compression-wise indeed better than image formats from the 80s and 90s like jpeg and png.
But there are some downsides. Let me elaborate a bit. @laughinghan @atax1a @atomicthumbs 1) Video codecs are designed for low bitrate, since they need to do lots of frames per second so bandwidth is a bigger concern and also you don't have time to look at each single frame anyway. Compression techniques for low bitrate are different than for high fidelity though.

Chrome's decision may actually turn out to be a blessing in disguise, in the long run. Allow me to explain. 🧵 WebP and AVIF were created specifically for one use case: web image delivery. In both cases, the reasoning was "we have this video codec in the browser anyway, so we might as well use it for images too".

There's something about color spaces and their transfer curves that has been bothering me for a while. Put bluntly: image (and video) codecs can be racist. Of course not intentionally, and it's a pretty subtle thing, but 'being bad at dark shades' has implications. An example. 🧵 Consider these two images. I'm hoping twitter recompression will not ruin them too much — these are the original images, before compression.

Overall, JPEG XL at default cjxl speed outperforms AVIF even when using a very slow libaom setting (s1, >30 times slower). At a more reasonable libaom s7 (about half as fast as default cjxl), the improvement JPEG -> AVIF is comparable to the improvement AVIF -> JPEG XL. Of course behind the overall picture, there are differences depending on the image contents. For example, for images of sports or rooms, AVIF actually does (slightly) better than JPEG XL (if you don't mind the extra encode time).