Google Chrome had begun preparations to remove support for the JPEG-XL image format from its browser, and now a Google engineer has given their reasons for dropping the format.
As previously reported, Google Chrome / Chromium is planning to roll out a patch to remove support for the still-experimental JPEG-XL image format from the web browser, which will deprecate image support for JPEG-XL in Chrome 110 and later versions.
This is a surprising move by Google considering that JPEG-XL is still very young in its lifecycle and has been gaining increasing industry interest and support. Today Google engineers commented on the Chromium JPEG-XL issue tracker and gave their reasoning.
The engineer gave the following reasons.
Experimental logos and code should not be kept indefinitely
There is not enough interest in the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL
JPEG-XL image format does not offer enough incremental advantages over the existing format to justify enabling it by default
By removing the flags and code from M110, it reduces the maintenance burden and allows us to focus on improving the existing formats supported in Chrome
Considering that the code for the JPEG-XL image format was only frozen at the end of 2020, the file format was only standardized last year, and the encoding system was only standardized earlier this year, it’s a bit of a stretch for Google to be “not interested enough in the whole ecosystem” around JPEG-XL.
Some users have pointed out that Google is also not pursuing the launch of WebP 2 as an image format right now, but just an experiment for Google. It looks like Google will focus on eventually further advancing WebP and AVIF image formats.
The JPEG-XL format is a royalty-free bitmap file format that supports lossy and lossless compression. It is designed to surpass existing bitmap formats and be a universal replacement for them.
