Chrome Surrenders to JPEG XL — and the Web Gets a 20% Shrink-Ray
Google killed the format three years ago. Now, a 100,000-line code rewrite has forced a universal browser rollout by the end of 2026.
Three years ago, Google’s Chrome team quietly took the web’s most promising image format out back and shot it. Citing a lack of interest, they stripped JPEG XL from the world’s dominant browser to clear the runway for their own alternative, AVIF. But they miscalculated. Today, after a stubborn holdout by Apple and a massive engineering ultimatum from Mozilla, Google is being forced into a stunning reversal.
The Format That Refused to Die
When Google killed JPEG XL in late 2022, co-creator Jon Sneyers published exhaustive rebuttals proving Chrome's performance testing was flawed. It didn't matter. Without the browser that controls two-thirds of desktop traffic, a new web format is effectively a ghost. Developers were told to move on to AVIF, a format derived from Google's own video technology.
Then Apple did something unusual. In September 2023, Safari quietly shipped native support for JPEG XL. It was a massive crack in Chrome's armor. Two years later, the PDF Association drove the wedge deeper, declaring JPEG XL the preferred standard for HDR images in PDFs. Suddenly, even Chrome's built-in PDF viewer needed to read the files Google had banned.
The momentum had shifted, but there was a final, massive roadblock standing in the way of universal browser adoption.
A 100,000-Line Hostage Negotiation
Mozilla liked JPEG XL's features, but they despised how it was built. The original decoder was written in C++, a language notorious for memory vulnerabilities.
For a browser, parsing untrusted images from the open web using a sprawling C++ library is a security nightmare waiting to happen. So, Mozilla pragmatically weaponized their market share. Lead engineer Jake Archibald delivered an ultimatum: rewrite the entire core into Rust, a memory-safe programming language, or Firefox would never touch it.
“But, at 100,000 lines of multithreaded C++, we were concerned about the attack surface this added to Firefox. Build a safe, performant, compact, and compatible JPEG XL decoder in Rust, and we'll ship it.”— Jake Archibald
Google Research took the bait. They engineered jxl-rs, a completely memory-safe Rust decoder that neutralized the security threat. By November 2025, Chrome Architecture Tech Lead Rick Byers officially threw in the towel, admitting the positive signals meant Chrome would welcome the Rust integration. The hostage negotiation worked.
The Reversible Shrink-Ray
With Firefox activating JPEG XL in September 2026 and Chrome following before the year ends, the immediate winner is anyone on a slow connection. Modern formats like AVIF load top-to-bottom. JPEG XL brings back progressive rendering: an image becomes visually recognizable after just a few kilobytes of data, starting blurry and snapping into crystalline focus as it downloads.
But the format's true superpower is its treatment of the past. JPEG XL can ingest the billions of legacy JPEG files already sitting on servers and compress them by roughly 20 percent without altering a single pixel of the original data. It is a bit-exact, reversible shrink-ray for the internet's oldest media.
There are still hurdles. Apple's initial Safari implementation remains a half-measure that lacks progressive rendering, and developers will be juggling fallback code for years to accommodate older browsers. But the format's survival proves that independent standards and a united developer class can still outmaneuver a browser monopoly. The web's oldest image standard just secured its future, and it did it the hard way.
What people are saying
“JPEG XL enabled by default in a month in Firefox, Chrome - finally starting wide adaptation: ~2x smaller web images/photos, HDR, alpha, lossless, animations, progressive decoding.”
“MLBカード新作！！『MLB 2026 Topps Chrome Baseball Logofractor Edition』入荷致しました！！ 店頭販売中！！ Logofractor Editionには、Logofractor Edition限定のMLBロゴがデザインされた”Logofractor”パラレルが封入！”
JPEG XL's Four-Year Survival Saga
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