Google *Unkills* JPEG XL?

Summary

I’ve written about JPEG XL in the past. First, I noted Google’s move to kill the format in Chromium in favor of the homegrown and inferior AVIF. Then, I had a deeper look at the format, and visually compared JPEG XL with AVIF on a handful of images.The latter post started with a quick support test:“If you are browsing this page around 2023, chances are that your browser supports AVIF but does not support JPEG XL.”Well, here we are at the end of 2025, and this very sentence still holds true. Unless you are one of the 17% of users using Safari, or are adventurous enough to use a niche browser like Thorium or LibreWolf, chances are you see the AVIF banner in green and the JPEG XL image in black/red.The good news is, this will change soon. In a dramatic turn of events, the Chromium team has reversed its Obsolete tag, and has decided to support the format in Blink (the engine behind Chrome/Chromium/Edge). Given Chrome’s position in the browser market share, I predict the format will become a de factor standard for images in the near future.Let’s recapI’ve been following JPEG XL since its experimental support in Blink. What started as a promising feature was quickly axed by the team in a bizarre and ridiculous manner. First, they asked the community for feedback on the format. Then, the community responded very positively. And I don’t only mean a couple of guys in their basement. Meta, Intel, Cloudinary, Adobe, ffmpeg, libvips, Krita, and many more. After that came the infamous comment:da...@chromium.orgda...@chromium.org#85 Oct 31, 2022 12:34AMThank you everyone for your comments and feedback regarding JPEG XL. We will be removing the JPEG XL code and flag from Chromium for the following reasons:Experimental flags and code should not remain indefinitelyThere is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XLThe new image format does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats to warrant enabling it by defaultBy rem...