Last year, Google announced its decision to deprecate JPEG-XL image format support in its Chrome/Chromium browser; and stated that the main reason is that "the overall ecology lacks interest in the JPEG-XL format and it is difficult to continue to promote experiments " and other factors.
Today, however, the Chromium issue tracker for reconsidering JPEG-XL support has been updated. According to the statement, the move was mainly influenced by Apple, which decided to provide JPEG-XL support in its Safari browser this year.
"This is very important because it changes the underlying assumption that there was less interest in the JPEG XL ecosystem. This was no longer the case when the second-largest browser added support. It's a completely new development that fully justifies starting over. The original discussion about adding JPEG XL to Chromium is reasonable."
Also, support for JPEG XL in other software is growing rapidly: see this document for details .
Currently, the status of this issue has been updated from Unconfirmed to Untriaged:
Set the status to untriaged and ask someone from the appropriate development team to investigate this issue for further updates.
JPEG XL is based on Google's PIK format and Cloudinary's FUIF format (which is based on FLIF), and its default settings provide good compression while achieving near-lossless visuals, a project that hopes to become the standard for other raster lossy and A general-purpose replacement for lossless image formats.
- JPEG refers to the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the committee that designed the format.
- The X refers to part of the names of several JPEG standards from 2000: JPEG XT , JPEG XR , JPEG XS .
- The L stands for long term, since this format was created to replace the older JPEG file format and can be used for the same amount of time.
The JPEG-XL bitstream format was finalized in late 2021 and is beginning to be adopted by various open and closed source applications. JPEG-XL aims to be royalty-free, although Microsoft was awarded a patent earlier this year for the "rANS" (Range Asymmetric Number System) data compression used by JPEG-XL, which raised some concerns.
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