JPEG-XL is a royalty-free bitmap file format that supports both lossy and lossless compression. It is designed to surpass existing bitmap formats and become a universal alternative to them.
So far, its performance is much better than JPEG, so it is favored by many developers. Surprisingly, however, Google Chrome is already preparing to remove support for JPEG-XL images from its browser.
▲ Current Chrome / Chromium versions allow enabling JPEG-XL image format support
Chrome has offered JPEG-XL (JXL) image format support via a feature switch (chrome://flags/#enable-jxl) since version v91, while Google is considering deprecating this new image format in Chrome 110.
In fact, the JPEG-XL file format was only standardized last year, and the encoding system was confirmed earlier this year, but it has been frozen since late 2020 without being officially adopted.
As you can see from the Google Developer Bug List, Chrome / Blink support for JPEGX-XL has been improving over the past year, and there is a lot of interest in JPEG-XL image format support.
But this morning, developers submitted a plan to deprecate JPEG-XL support in Chrome / Chromium M110. If nothing else, the JPEG XL format will be deprecated in Chrome version 110.
No official reason has been given for their decision to abandon JPEG-XL, but considering that Google has been actively promoting their WebP format and is even working on the WebP2 format, this result is not too disappointing.
