I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it’s more like gambling with your wallet if you don’t get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.

A shortlist:

• it has the best lossy image compression (not counting extremely low bitrate images, where AVIF starts to win)
• it can losslessly recompress JPEGs for a free 20% space savings - no image quality loss
• it supports parallel decoding for extra speed
• it supports progressive decoding (viewing a lower quality version of the image while it loads), unlike WebP/AVIF which just “pop up” when you’ve downloaded the whole thing
• it supports lossless
• it compresses lossless extremely well (notably unlike AVIF and PNG which fall on their face with lossless compression)
• it supports animation (though AVIF is generally a better format for animation, because it’s based on a proper video codec)
• it supports HDR
• it has a very strong resilience against generation loss (the classic “JPEG degradation” of resaving images)
• it is royalty-free
• it otherwise has roughly every image format feature we’ve ever thought of included in its spec

If JXL is not the next image format then we will never ever get rid of JPEG and PNG. There has never been a more obviously superior image format in history.

It’s possible. I think the biggest obstacle is that the corporations feeding on people’s data are not going to just stand by while it happens.