a passively nodal intravenously networked nervous-system fleabag with a smile :)
anarch-esperantisto who enjoys various weird things, like film photography, ham radio, writing systems, and ancient operating systems (win2000 to OS/2 to UNIX),
and big cats!
blanket CW: im weird sorry
there might be kinks here!
also @degarf
why can't browsers just support moar filetypes, it's not like they care about executable size or memory usage lol
i'd love to see a time where JXL is a thing people actually use (thank u nsxiv for letting me view basically all/most image file types) but what is actually stalling adoption?
sorry if this has been gone over a lot already
Politics. Google says no but you can use webp instead, and Mozilla says yes but only in Firefox nightlies, and that's all of the web browsers.
The thing you have to understand is that every web browser that doesn't explicitly advertise that it uses Firefox/Gecko or Webkit under the hood is Slightly Different Chrome at this point, without exaggeration. So if Google says no, that's it, the conversation is over.
i wonder why mozilla is apprehensive, could it be cuz of their ties with google? that sucks tho :( now i get why people have also been kinda iffy about webp.
Mozilla would introduce a new feature in Firefox Nightly first so that users can test it out and shake out the biggest bugs before it launches to the general public. If a feature is in Nightly, it's not a guarantee that it's going to launch, but it means Mozilla is interested.
The thing is that on the modern internet, EVERYTHING is a security problem that hasn't happened yet. If there isn't a sudden overwhelming interest in supporting a new file format, or in this case if the biggest player (Google) doesn't make their own format (webp/webm) and force everyone to start using it, the benefits of providing support for it to users may not outweigh the increased attack surface and potential for a new exploit to be found.
Gecko is the last remaining web rendering engine that is even in the same ballpark as Blink (and Webkit by virtue of being the only rendering engine allowed on iOS; even on a Mac people install Chrome). If Mozilla rushes to include a new format in Firefox and something goes wrong, there's a nonzero chance that everything collapses and we end up in the future where Taco Bell is the only restaurant and a defrosted Sylvester Stallone has to figure out how to use seashells.
Big one: it only stabilized in late 2021 so there’s only really been one year to add it, and it’s still getting revisions too. As mentioned in the other comment, it’s available in experimental builds of Firefox. It’s in WebKit but not yet in Safari (who knows when/if that’ll happen but it’s reasonable to expect it to follow open-source WebKit).
