The JPEG image format has been around since 1986, venerable by technical standards. Its replacement JPEG 2000, however, is still not supported by Microsoft and Firefox browsers.

Here’s an examplw of a JPEG 2000 image as seen through current browser technology :

Over at CodingHorror blog, they are asking why this is so.

The promise of JPEG 2000 is higher image quality in much smaller file sizes, at the minor cost of additional CPU time. And since we always seem to have a lot more CPU time than bandwidth, this is a perfect tradeoff.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really matter which next-generation image compression format is better, since nobody uses them. Microsoft neglected to include support for HD Photo in Internet Explorer 7. And Firefox doesn’t currently support JPEG 2000, either.

It does seem to be a static environment at the moment.

“Until a commonly used web browser supports JPEG 2000 or HD Photo, there’s no traction. I hope the next browser releases can move us beyond the ancient JPEG image compression format.”