The Future of JPEG XL: Why the Format Sparks So Much Debate
Technically, JPEG XL is one of the best image formats ever made. But its fate reads like a drama series: Chrome first added support, then pointedly removed it, developers staged a revolt, Apple went its own way, and rescue arrived from an unexpected direction. Let's unpack what happened and whether the format has a future.
The JPEG XL paradox
Usually a format's story is simple: it's either good and wins, or weak and disappears. With JPEG XL it's the opposite. On specs it's almost a reference design — light, with HDR, transparency, animation and a unique trick of losslessly recompressing old JPEGs. And yet for years it stalled exactly where it mattered most: in browsers.
So what's going on? A format's quality is only half the battle. The other half is big-company politics, security questions and the plain inertia of the web's vast ecosystem. This clash is exactly what we'll cover. The format's basics, we explained in "What Is JPEG XL".
In short
JPEG XL's problem isn't the technology — it's support. A brilliant format can stay unused if the key browsers decide not to display it. The story of the last few years is exactly about that struggle.
A promising start
The JPEG XL standard was published as ISO/IEC 18181 in 2021–2022, and at first everything looked rosy. In April 2021 Chrome added experimental support behind a flag. Enthusiasts tested, compared, and marveled at the compression results. It seemed JPEG XL was about to become the new web standard, leaving both JPEG and WebP behind.
The format was praised for a rare combination: it compressed photos beautifully, stored graphics losslessly, and could load smoothly and progressively. On paper it had no weak spots.
Removal from Chrome — and the storm
Then came the U-turn. In late 2022, in Chrome 110, Google dropped experimental JPEG XL support. The official wording was dry: a lack of interest from the ecosystem, insufficient gains over existing formats, and a wish to focus on improving those.
The developer reaction was fierce. Many found the arguments unconvincing: interest clearly existed, and the gains were measurable. The Chromium bug tracker filled with hundreds of comments asking to restore the format, including voices from large companies. But the decision stood — and JPEG XL effectively dropped out of the planet's most popular browser.
Apple goes its own way
While the Chromium camp argued, Apple made a bold move. In 2023, Safari 17 shipped native JPEG XL support — the format worked not just in the browser but in iOS and macOS too, right out of the box.
It was an important signal: one of the market's biggest players believed in the format. For Apple users JPEG XL instantly became usable — files opened in Photos, Preview and Safari with no setup. As of today Safari remains the only major browser where the format is enabled by default.
Rescue written in Rust
One real reason for the caution was security. The JPEG XL reference decoder is written in C++ and is fairly large, and every line of code that handles files from the internet is a potential vulnerability. Mozilla worried that the large, complex software needed to read these files (the "decoder") gave hackers more places to attack, so it stayed on the fence and was in no hurry to switch the format on.
The resolution came from where no one expected — from Rust, a language famous for memory safety. Then a brand-new reader for the format, called jxl-rs, was rebuilt from scratch in Rust. It removed the main objection, and in 2026 Chrome brought JPEG XL support back built on it — still behind an experimental flag, but a very different attitude from "remove and forget." Firefox, meanwhile, took support from test builds all the way to a stable release.
Why Rust specifically
Most vulnerabilities in file-handling software are memory bugs. Rust is designed to prevent many of them outright. So rewriting the decoder in Rust wasn't a whim — it was a way to remove the chief objection to the format.
An unexpected ally: PDF
And in late 2025 JPEG XL gained another heavyweight supporter — the PDF Association. It needed a format capable of carrying HDR images inside documents, and the choice fell on JPEG XL as the preferred solution.
That matters more than it sounds. PDF is one of the most widespread document formats in the world, and its support gives JPEG XL a whole new niche, independent of browser whims. The more such independent footholds a format has, the more stable its position.
So is there a future?
Put it all together, and the picture in 2026 looks far more optimistic than a couple of years ago:
- Safari supports the format by default.
- Firefox reached a stable release.
- Chrome brought JPEG XL back on a safe Rust decoder.
- PDF picked it for HDR images in documents.
This doesn't mean the whole web switches to JPEG XL tomorrow — WebP and AVIF have too big a head start, and we compared them in detail in "JPEG XL vs AVIF vs WebP". But the format is definitely alive and slowly gaining footing. The big lesson of this story: in tech, the winner isn't the best — it's the one everyone agrees to support.
Already run into a .jxl file and don't know what to do with it?
Don't wait for every browser to support it. The FormatZ converter turns JPEG XL into PNG in a couple of seconds — free and right in your browser.
Convert JXL to PNGWant to try the format of the future on your own pictures instead? Check out the PNG → JXL converter, or read how lossless JPEG recompression works.
