It's not just Google, Mozilla has no desire to introduce a barely supported massive C++ decoder for marginal gains either:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064

avif is just better for typical web image quality, it produces better looking images and its artifacts aren't as annoying (smoothing instead of blocking and ringing around sharp edges).

You also get it for basically free because it's just an av1 key frame. Every browser needs an av1 decoder already unless it's willing to forego users who would like to be able to watch Netflix and YouTube.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Mozilla said over a year ago that they would support JXL as soon as there's a fast memory safe decoder that will be supported.

Google on the other hand never expressed any desire to support JXL at all, regardless of the implementation. Only just now after the PDF Association announced that PDF would be using JXL, did they decide to support JXL on the web.

> avif is just better for typical web image quality, it produces better looking images and its artifacts aren't as annoying (smoothing instead of blocking and ringing around sharp edges).

AVIF is certainly better for the level of quality that Google wants you to use, but in reality, images on the web are much higher quality than that.

And JXL is pretty good if you want smoothing, in fact libjxl's defaults have gotten so overly smooth recently that it's considered a problem which they're in the process of fixing.

I disagree about the image quality at typical sizes - I find JPEG-XL is generally similar or better than AVIF at any reasonable compression ratios for web images. See this for example: https://tonisagrista.com/blog/2023/jpegxl-vs-avif/

AVIF only comes out as superior at extreme compression ratios at much lower bit rates than are typically used for web images, and the images generally look like smothered messes at those extreme ratios.

Even though AVIF decoding support is fairly widespread by now, it is still not ubiquitous like JPEG/PNG/GIF. So typically services will store or generate the same image in multiple formats including AVIF for bandwidth optimization and JPEG for universal client support. Browser headers help to determine compatibility, but it's still fairly complicated to implement, and users also end up having to deal with different platforms supporting different formats when they are served WebP or AVIF and want to reupload an image somewhere else that does not like those formats. As far as I can tell, JXL solves that issue for most websites since it is backwards-compatible and can be decoded into JPEG when a client does not support JXL. I would happily give up a few percent in compression efficiency to get back to a single all-purpose lossy image format.

Not everything in the world is passive end-of-the-line presentation. JPEG-XL is the only one that tries to be a general-purpose image format.

Can AVIF display 10 bit HDR with larger color gamut that any modern phone nowadays is capable of capturing?

>avif is just better for typical web image quality,

What does "typical web image quality" even mean? I see lots of benchmarks with very low BPPs, like 0.5 or even lower, and that's where video-based image codecs shine.

However, I just visited CNN.com and these are the BPPs of the first 10 images my browser loaded: 1.40, 2.29, 1.88, 18.03 (PNG "CNN headlines" logo), 1.19, 2.01, 2.21, 2.32, 1.14, 2.45.

I believe people are underestimating the BPP values that are actually used on the web. I'm not saying that low-BPP images don't exist, but clearly it isn't hard to find examples of higher-quality images in the wild.