Chrome Depracates JPEG XL

See Chrome Depracates JPEG XL on www.phoronix.com

I was looking into how I could support multiple image formats on my site and I discovered that Google Chrome are going to depracate JPEG XL, though it was still behind an experimental flag. I won’t speculate on whether they have ulterior motives, but their stated reasons boil down to it not being worth the development effort given that there isn’t much interest over it as well as how it doesn’t have many benefits over existing image formats.

It not having developer interest is rather strange. Of course it doesn’t because it’s new and it was behind a flag in Chrome. Given its capabilities, I don’t get why developers wouldn’t be interested in it. Also, Adobe, Affinity, GIMP and Krita all support JPEG XL so there’s that.

Again, I don’t want to speculate since I don’t know much about Google’s motivations. You could argue that they want to push WebP2, but they now want it to be a playground for image compression experiments. While I’m far from understanding how to support other image codecs on my site, JPEG XL is really promising and I’d encourage browsers to take a good look at it. If you want to know more about it, read the creator Jon Sneyers arcticle on the case for JPEG XL.