It was a clearly false statement when they said it. Adobe added JPEG XL to its products. Along with them, Facebook, flickr, and a bunch of other services expressed their eagerness to support the new format (because it is vastly superior to all prior image format options). Google decided it conflicted with their competitor format AVIF and axed the experiment.

> Google decided it conflicted with their competitor format AVIF

This is absolutely ridiculous take given JPEG XL is mainly authored by Google and Cloudinary, with AVIF coming from Netflix & alliance that includes Google.

There is no "competitor" here. Just a format nobody else indicated interest in supporting (notably Apple which forces ~half of mobile marked to have no support, given their browser engine restrictions).

Now that they added the support Chrome can easily bring it back.

1. There is nothing ridiculous about cutting another format, whether it is authored by them or not. It took a stand and it was Pro AOM.

2. There has never been another image format that has the level of support or interest as JEPG XL since JPEG becomes the internet standard. And that was before the drama of Chrome dropping support for it.

All I learned from this is you accept corporate lip service

WebKit already added support for it if I remember correctly. It's just not on Safari so to speak since it uses the macOS stack for this, so it needs the OS itself to adopt it, but Apple was clearly interested in it.

And web browsers aren't the industry. Adobe added support for it, for example, and it didn't really seem like Google did a good-faith discussion with actual industry players, who range from content creation software to OS makers to other web browsers.

It's also not like there are people lining up to use AVIF right now and Google is still pushing for it.