I was pleasantly surprised to see that Apple will ship support for the JPEG XL and HEIC image formats in Safari 17. Safari 17 will be the only browser to support the 3 most modern image formats: AVIF, HEIC, and JPEG XL.
This was announced at The Worldwide Developers Conference 2023, you can watch a video at the link below to hear Apple’s thoughts on these image formats:
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10122/
I spoke about this topic recently in a post: The next generation image format for the web is not JPEG XL?. I discussed the “image format war”. Google went all-in on AVIF, and was opposed to JPEG XL, so much so that they removed it from Chrome. As I said then:
Perhaps, the jig is not up for JPEG XL and HEIC. WebP was in Chrome for 5 years before the others decided to follow suit. The format war is a war of attrition!
May the format, pure of heart, triumph and rule the seven kingdoms!
Or maybe, it does not have to be a war, can the spoils be shared and we can rule together in harmony? Can we have AVIF and JPEG XL?
I hope that Google are paying attention to Apple and that they reconsider their position on JPEG XL. JPEG XL and AVIF are 2 different beasts. It would be refreshing if every major browser implemented all of the modern image formats, just like Apple. š¤
