1688064 - Implement jxl content-encoding

Status: NEW

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Robert-André Mauchin]

JPEG XL is both available as image encoding and as content encoding. This feature request concerns the latter part.

Thanks to its lossless backward compatibility, JPEG XL offers a reduction of -22% in transferred bytes over traditional JPEG. Adopting the jxl content encoding would significantly increase page load speed, and benefit users not having high-speed network access. It would also benefit CDN by reducing bandwidth cost.

Here is the roadmap planned by JPEG XL: https://res.cloudinary.com/cloudinary-marketing/image/upload/w_700,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto,dpr_2.0/Web_Assets/blog/transition_path.png

The format has been frozen on December 24th 2020. https://gitlab.com/wg1/jpeg-xl/-/releases/v0.2

The reference software at https://gitlab.com/wg1/jpeg-xl/ is licensed under Apache 2.0 with a royalty-free patent grant from the contributors.

The chromium team already plans to support JXL as content-encoding in https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1088429
It would be great to have feature parity with Blink based browser. Anthough it is not yet supported by any servers, support in Firefox and Blink-based browser will certainly drive adoption.

Comment 1

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them)]

(The Chromium issue says "Permission denied")

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug has a release status flag that shows some version of Firefox is affected, thus it will be considered confirmed.