Here's a real and true story about how separate Microsoft teams communicate and coordinate:

Few weeks ago, some Microsoft team from the US deprecated some critical service used by other Microsoft products. They just shut it off without notifying anyone. Other teams from other Microsoft offices in the rest of the world found about this deprecation when their production builds started failing to log customers in to the applications that they need for their businesses. People were called in from their vacations, emergency meetings were held to play hot potato with responsibility. Clients were PISSED. I stopped following the drama before it was resolved.

Little tech? Like, a micro company that makes software? A "micro-soft", if you will.

I wouldn't mind if all those Electron apps could use it to save space, but no. Everything still comes with 600MB of Chromium bolted to it like a tumour.

Ah fair enough, I thought that with it being Windows XP era software made by Microsoft, it wouldn't load codecs dynamically like that lol

Hear me out:
AI-powered webp support

what would they be?

do you mean in sense of lossy or lossless? if so, in theory both webp and avif could have lossless photos, but i do not think they are designed for that (think in terms of their backrounds, they are kinda like a single frame videos. and usually you only have lossy video).

jpeg xl in theory aims to take job of both jpeg and png (it can handle lossy as well as lossless). In theory, we (as in all of computing and media people) decide to back on jpegxl, we could potentially just have 1 format, and accordingly 1 library which provides support. but that is just a dream i do not see happening. google essentially paralysed jpeg xl by removing it from chromium , and that is the largest userbase.

almost all other big companies want to use jpeg xl. meta, adobe, intel and others. the main benefit to them is reduced bandwidth cost (for exactly same data, jpeg xl can be ~20% smaller than jpeg), and jpeg can be losslessly translated to jxl, and even for backwards compatibility, reverse can be done on client end. but without chrome, no web developer will adopt. if web people do not, the demand for format would be extremely small, no hardware manufacturer will include hardware support (your gpus have "special" stuff for almot all codecs and formats, but that is not the case for jxl for now), so jxl operations currently are slow, so end user might not even be motivated to use (other than space savings).

https://jpegxl.info/

IMO AVIF works really well at making convincing looking results at really high compression ratios, it's worse at pretty much everything else.

And occasionally the 'convincing looking' results aren't actually very accurate to the original image...

But those results really do look very convincing.

And IMO one of the most compelling features of JPEG-XL is its' great lossless compression, although it is generally good all-around. AVIF is pretty terrible at lossless compression, usually well-behind WebP and only a bit better than PNG.

Anyways, for photos, if you want to compress them a ton then maybe AVIF is best, but if you want high quality JXL is probably best.

I think https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front is a good comparison

that is indeed the sad truth

yes, but that is a bit apple specific, and on intel side, they support hwdec since 2021. and since these are just images, even software decoding works (although a bit slower)

svg is great, but at vector graphics. we are mostly discussing raster formats.

I do expect it to be a matter of time. Typically, you pull some image rendering library into your program, which pulls in a whole bunch of libraries that support the different image formats.
As such, it's the job of that intermediary library to support as many formats as possible. If you keep that intermediary library up-to-date, you may get support for new image formats without really doing anything.

But well, it may take more time for this to happen, for various reasons. One reason is obviously that we already have other image formats that may not be amazing, but they work everywhere, so most people continue to use those.
Another aspect that may slow adoption down, is that .webp was spear-headed by Google alone. Normally, you get other industry leaders into the boat, to make sure you cover everyone's use-cases and have somewhat of a commitment for them to integrate it. I assume that Photoshop supports .webp by now, but it probably took relatively long for that to happen, for example.

No, i was confused with heic

What format is that? lol

Yeah, I copied a .jxl over to my Windows 11 VM out of curiosity and was surprised to see it opened just fine.