What this [removal of support for JPEG-XL in Chromium] really translates to is, “We’ve created WebP, a competing standard, and want to kill anything that might genuinely compete with it”. This would also partly explain why they adopted AVIF but not JPEG XL. AVIF wasn’t superior in every way and, as such, didn’t threaten to dethrone WebP.
[0] https://vale.rocks/posts/jpeg-xl-and-googles-war-against-it
That 20B a year that Google pays to Apple, think of that but a bigger traffic stream. That is Chrome, so Chrome is worth MORE than 20B a year to Google.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple...
This is less just blind pressure but rather the risk that google becomes seen as an untrustworthy custodian of chromium and that downstreams start supporting an alternate upstream outside of google's control.
Jxl is certainly a hill that google seems intent to stand on but I doubt it's one they'd choose to die on. Doubly so given the ammo it'd give in the ongoing chrome anti-trust lawsuits.
It's worth noting that Firefox is willing to adopt JPEG-XL[1] as soon as the rust implementation[2] is mature And that rust impl is a direct port from the reference C++ implementation[3]. Mac OS and Safari already support JPEG-XL [4]. And recently Windows picked up JPEG-XL support. The only blockers at this point are Firefox, Chromium, and Android. If/when Firefox adopts JPEG-XL, we'll probably see google follow suit if only out of pressure from downstream Chromium platforms wanting to adopt it to maintain parity.
So really if you want to see JPEG-XL get adopted, go throw some engineering hours at the rust implementation [2] to help get it up to feature parity with the reference impl.
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1. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064
2. https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs
3. https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl
4. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/07/apple_safari_jpeg_xl/
5. https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/03/05/turn-on-jpeg-xl-jxl...