Google Chrome’s technical lead, Rick Byers, has recently announced his intention to incorporate a high-performance and memory-safe image format decoder called JPEG-XL into the Chromium engine. Byers stated that the main criteria for enabling the JPEG-XL decoder by default would be ensuring its long-term maintenance.
The decision to include the JPEG-XL decoder was made based on changes in the landscape since the last evaluation of the JPEG XL implementation. In the past two years, Safari browser has added support for JPEG XL, while developers have expressed their interest in supporting JPEG XL in Firefox. Additionally, JPEG XL will be included in the PDF specification. Google also took into consideration feedback from developers after JPEG XL was removed from Chrome in 2022, citing low interest from the ecosystem and a desire to reduce maintenance overhead.
Following Byers’ announcement, another developer provided a status report on the proposed JPEG-XL implementation for Chrome. The code used for JPEG-XL support in Chromium was updated and synchronized with the reference implementation from libjxl, with new features like animation support being added.
JPEG XL, standardized in 2021 as a replacement for JPEG, offers several advantages such as up to 60% reduction in size compared to JPEG, support for HDR, animation, transparency, and progressive loading mode, smooth quality degradation with decreasing bitrate, lossless JPEG compression, support for up to 4099 channels, various color depths, and no requirement for patent royalties with an open reference implementation available under the BSD license.