Be Evil, Google & JPEG-XL
2023-04-18
Ah yes, another day, another asshole move by Big Tech. It seems that almost every single day Big Tech makes a bad decision that influence our lives in a negative manner, one way or another. This time it's our "friends" at Google, the creators of Surveillance Capitalism.
Let me just say this: If you were to host an Anal (read "annual") Conference for Assholes, Google would be a gold member.
"But ferds, why are you so upset?!" I hear you say... Well, Google decided to deprecate the JPEG-XL spec for images on the web. And usually don't care much for web spec stuff, but when it comes to moves made by Google I always take note. Pretty sure they have malicious ulterior motives.
What is JPEG-XL?
I am not an expert on this, but I will give a short answer: It is a tool, that is Royalty Free, which is used to compress large, high quality images on web pages to a smaller sizes, but allows the image to retain its "good looks". This saves on web page size, bandwidth and loading speeds. See the wiki for more
So why am I upset by this?
This is an example of Google abusing its power, something it loves to do. The power comes in the form of so many people using their products, but it mostly comes from people using the Google Chrome Browser. This 95%+ majority market share allows them to dictate in which direction the web should go. They do not care about what is right or wrong, they are all about the MUNNNNAAAAAY, which they get from surveilling their users.
So if you want to see an open, fair and free web, change your browser. Use Firefox, Pale Moon, Basilisk, Epiphany, anything but a Chromium-based browser.
"May we forever graze on The Pasture Of Muppets"
Source:
Google decides to deprecate JPEG-XL
/April_2023/