"Mozilla reps tell me they've met with Microsoft about their concerns," reports PC Magazine, "but that the company wasn't responsive." "They'll do the minimum the law requires to respect user choice," explains Kush Amlani, Mozilla's counsel overseeing global competition and regulatory work... Mozilla recently marked 100 days since it released an 87-page report detailing the ways in which Microsoft pushes Edge on Windows PCs.... One example is how Windows often displays a "Let's finish setting up your PC" pop-up after an OS update. This screen has an enabled-by-default option to "use recommended browser settings," which makes Edge the default web browser. However, that screen doesn't appear in Europe. European laws now force Microsoft to make Windows more respectful of user choices. For instance, in European countries, the Start menu opens links in your default web browser rather than in Edge, as it does everywhere else. Amlani says Mozilla wants Microsoft to release the European version of Windows to the rest of the world. However, he thinks this will require government action. As he puts it, "Microsoft can do better when it's forced." The last line of the article sums up Mozilla's main point. "No one should have to fight their OS this hard on something as simple as a browser preference."

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Mozilla plans to enable JPEG XL decoding by default in Firefox 157, which is due at the end of September. Phoronix reports: Firefox Nightly has JPEG-XL support enabled by default right now to help in vetting this support while Mozilla believes the support is in good enough shape for a stable debut with Firefox 157. This follows Chrome shipping JPEG-XL and Google Research developing jxl-rs as a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that is both performant and secure. In today's Mozilla Hacks blog post they elaborate on JPEG-XL vs. AVIF image formats: "JPEG XL: Excels at lossless imagery, progressive rendering, and further compressing JPEGs without quality loss. AVIF: Excels at web-quality photographic images, and images that have a mix of sharp edges and flat surfaces. ... Although AVIF tends to produce smaller files at web-quality than JPEG XL, AVIF only has basic progressive rendering support. So, for very large images, it may be worth taking the filesize hit with JPEG XL."

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