People are quick to blame Google for the slow uptake of Jpeg XL, but I don't think that can be the whole story. Lots of other vendors, including non-commercial free software projects, have also been slow to support it. Gimp for example still only supports it via a plugin.
But if it's not just a matter of Google being assholes, what's the actual issue with Jpeg XL uptake? No clue, does anyone know?
GIMP supports JPEG XL natively in 3.0 development versions. If I remember correctly GIMP 2.10 was released before JPEG-XL was ready, so I think that's the reason. They could have added support in smaller update though, which was the case with AVIF.
The problem with XL is that it has way too many features. HDR, for example. Firefox doesn't support HDR at all, Chrome added HDR image (not video) support just late last year. And that's just one feature of XL... Even if both Google and Mozilla will start actively working on support we won't see anything useful for a few years. And then how do you even create images in the first place?
That 0.18mb accumulates quickly on the server's side if you have 10000 people trying to access that image at the same time. And there are millions it not billions of images on the net. Just because we have the resources doesn't mean we should squander them..that's how you end up with chat apps taking multiple gigabytes of RAM.
“I’m very small minded and am not important or smart enough to have ever worked on a large-scale project in my life, but I will assume my lack of experience has earned me a sense of authority”
-Redisdead
10 whole GB of storage? I understand now why you need such an ultimate compression technology, this is an insurmountable amount of data in these harrowing times where you can buy a flash card the size of a fingernail that can hold that amount about 25 times.