Google rekindles relationship with jilted JPEG XL image format

Google has added support for the JPEG XL (JXL) image format to the open source Chromium code base, reversing a decision in 2022 to drop the technology.

A recent commit to integrate and enable the JXL decoder means that future releases of Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers will include code to process and present JXL images.

The format's supporters argue JXL can be used to recompress existing JPEG images without loss so they're 20 percent smaller, which alone would represent a significant bandwidth saving for websites and content delivery networks.

It also offers other improvements over existing image file formats, like progressive decoding that prioritizes salient image elements - as noted in 2021 by Google engineers - and better lossy and lossless compression than formats like AVIF, MozJPEG, and WebP.

JPEG XL [PDF] began with a call for proposals in 2017. It started taking shape in 2019 through an effort to combine Cloudinary's Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF) with Google's PIK. It was standardized as ISO/IEC 18181 in 2021 and revised in 2024.

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox initially implemented experimental support for JXL behind a settings flag in 2021, based on the possibility that JXL might be able to replace older JPEG and PNG formats.

A year later, Google Chrome engineers abandoned the open source image format by claiming "There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL."

They also argued the format "does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats to warrant enabling it by default." And they said that removing experimental support for the JXL code would reduce the maintenance burden.

In a 2023 blog post, Greg Farough, campaigns manager for the Free Software Foundation, implied that Google's disinterest in JXL reflected its preference for "its own patented AVIF format." AVIF is governed by The Alliance for Open Media, an industry group whose members include Google.

Google's assertion about lack of interest in the technology was promptly challenged in the Chromium bug tracking discussion. Many of the 500+ comments in the thread disputed Google's claim and cited numerous companies that had expressed interest in broader support for JXL.

Roland Wooster, principal engineer for Intel's client computing group, said at the time that Intel and its partners saw JXL as the best option for high dynamic range (HDR) still images and urged the Chrome team to reconsider.

"JPEG XL appears to be the only format with suitable compression for images on the web, 16-bit per color channel, and support for the color gamuts widely used by DSLR/MLC photographers, e.g. ProPhoto and other wide color gamuts capable of representing the color range captured by cameras," he wrote on August 24, 2022.

"Beyond the critical requirements, JPEG XL also supports other highly important features: lossless compression options for archival usage, progressive image download for efficient web display, and based on others' research appears to have class-leading compression rates, and superior image quality at the compression rates typically used for still images. No other format provides all of these important features for still images."

Representatives from other companies like Adobe, Cloudinary, Facebook, The Guardian, and Shopify echoed Intel's enthusiasm for JXL.

As for the purported maintenance burden, Jon Sneyers, senior image researcher at Cloudinary and editor of the JPEG XL spec, said in a November 2022 post that work required would be modest, amounting to little more than "occasionally bumping up a version number in a build script" to match a decoder library revision.

It took several more years for the message to sink in. In June 2023, Apple demonstrated its interest in the technology when it implemented support in WebKit for Safari 17. In September 2024, a member of Mozilla's Firefox team said the team would consider adopting JXL once a Rust-based decoder is available, citing safety concerns about the 100K lines of multithreaded C++ code within the reference libjxl decoder. That Rust-based alternative decoder, jxl-rs, is making progress.

Microsoft added support for JXL in Windows 11 version 24H2 in March 2025. And in November 2025, the PDF Association added JXL support to the spec.

That same month, on the mailing list for its Blink rendering engine, Google finally signaled its intention to integrate a memory-safe JPEG XL decoder in Chromium. That's jxl-rs. Now, two months later, integration has arrived. ®