The Google Chromium team, responsible for the browser engine used in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera and more, has declared its intention to ship an implementation of a JPEG XL decoder, reversing an October 2022 decision not to proceed with previous experimental support.

Rick Byers, ATL (area tech lead) on Google Chrome, posted that “we would welcome contributions to a performant and memory-safe JPEG XL decoder in Chromium,” citing support in Safari, potential support in Mozilla Firefox, the announcement of support in PDF, and “developer signals” in the form of upvotes and survey data.

This promises a positive outcome for a well-liked image format that appeared doomed when Google removed its support, declaring that “there is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL.”

That rationale angered developers since interest appeared to be plentiful; and the issue in the Chromium bug tracker gathered over 1,000 upvotes in response. Greg Farough, campaigns manager at the free software foundation, said at the time that the decision showed that “Google Chrome is the arbiter of web standards,” and that the company was acting in its own interests, not those of web users.

Most of the factors Byers cited are longstanding, so why the change of heart? It may be that forthcoming inclusion in the PDF specification tipped the balance, though Byers also noted a post last month previewing relevant results from the State of HTML survey, which was co-sponsored by Google. The survey showed demand for JPEG XL as among the top pain points cited by developers among proposals for interop 2026, a cross-company project to increase interoperability among web browsers.

The reference implementation of JPEG XL is libjxl, written in C++, which also formed the basis for the earlier Chromium experiment. This is unlikely to be used this time round, noting that Byers requested a “memory-safe” decoder. The obvious alternative is a Rust implementation based on jxl-rs from Google Research. The owner of the Rust-based proposal is Chromium committer Helmut Januschka, who is head of engineering at Austrian media company Krone Multimedia.  Januschka has opened a new issue to add JPEG XL support to Chromium using Rust.

This is a big step forward for JPEG XL, but its future is not yet assured. Support in Safari is incomplete, lacking animation support or progressive decoding, and few applications currently export to JPEG XL. But in the chicken-and-egg world of web standards, a Chromium decoder will provide a strong incentive for other applications to add support.