Back in 2022 was the surprising decision by Google that they were going to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in Chrome. By the end of 2022 they went ahead and removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium to the frustration of many web developers and end-users interested in this image format. Now though as we get ready to roll into 2026, Google engineers are looking at bringing back JPEG-XL support to the Chrome web browser.
In the years since other projects have continued embracing JPEG-XL image support, JPEG-XL continues seeing interest alongside WebP / AVIF / etc, and indeed was a poor by Google to prematurely remove JPEG-XL support from their web browser.
Google’s Rick Byers announced this week:
“Since JPEG XL was last evaluated, Safari has shipped support and Firefox has updated their position. We also continue to see developer signals for this in bug upvotes, Interop proposals, and survey data. There was also a recent announcement that JPEG XL will be added to PDF.
Given these positive signals, we would welcome contributions to integrate a performant and memory-safe JPEG XL decoder in Chromium. In order to enable it by default in Chromium we would need a commitment to long-term maintenance. With those and our usual launch criteria met, we would ship it in Chrome.
Rick (on behalf of Chrome ATLs)”
Opened this past week was this request for adding JPEG-XL supportt back to Chromium/Blink complete with JPEG-XL animations support. That is using libjxl though and for the “memory safe” JPEG-XL decoder they may end up going for the likes of jxl-rs for being a Rust-based implementation.
The original issue ticket around JPEG-XL decoding support is also being reopened.
Great seeing work toward JPEG-XL coming back to Chromium/Chrome but it really shouldn’t have been removed in the first place.
