Google Chrome/Chromium Goes Ahead In Removing JPEG-XL Support

Back in October was the surprising move of Google deprecating JPEG-XL support in their Chrome/Chromium web browser. Google engineers argued there wasn't enough interest in JPEG-XL and not sufficient enough benefits over existing formats. Their plan was to remove the JPEG-XL support in Chrome 110 and indeed that has now happened.

As of yesterday the code has been merged that removes JPEG-XL support from the Chromium/Chrome web browser code-base.

Users and developers outside of Google continued to express support for JPEG-XL and try to motivate Google to change their position on removing JPEG-XL support, but those events were ultimately unsuccessful.

Google argues that the support had been behind an experimental flag, lack of ecosystem support, and not enough benefits to the format. Google also has interest in alternative formats like WebP and AVIF.

The merge happened yesterday and JPEG-XL support is now removed.