JPEG2000 is a standard for compressing photographic images. It produces higher-quality images at smaller filesizes than the current web standard, JPEG, but the only browser to offer native support is Safari. Because of this, it is unfeasible for web sites to use JPEG2000, since they must assume their images would not be rendered.

I propose to write a new extension that will add JPEG2000 support to Firefox. Hopefully, if accepted, this will be the first step towards seeing ubiquitous support for JPEG2000 on the web.

The benefits of ubiquitous JPEG2000 support would be direct.
If Google, for example, saves 150 GB/day in bandwidth by serving smaller JPEG2000 files from Images, it could save twenty seven thousand dollars a year in bandwidth fees. End-users benefit too, by downloading smaller images that look better than what the current standard offers.

This project will be implemented as an extension for Firefox, allowing anybody interested to view JPEG2000 images inline, without necessating large changes to Firefox's trunk source code.

The full proposal may be viewed at http://eschew.org/projects/soc/2007/application.html