To the frustration of many developers and end-users, back in 2022 [1]Google deprecated JPEG-XL support in Chrome/Chromium and proceeded to [2]remove the support . That decision was [3]widely slammed and ultimately Google said they [4]may end up reconsidering it . In November [5]there was renewed activity and interest in restoring JPEG-XL within Google's image web browser and as of yesterday the code was merged.

JPEG-XL image support is back in the very latest Google Chrome/Chromium codebase. Back in December they [6]merged jxl-rs as a pure Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder from the official libjxl organization. At the end of December they did [7]more JPEG-XL plumbing with the enums and build flags for the support.

Now as of yesterday they [8]wired up the JXL decoder ! The jxl-rs-powered JPEG-XL image decoding is gated by the enable_jxl_decoder build flag but it's enabled by default. The decode support is wired up with proper MIME type handling (image/jxl), there is chrome://flags UI coverage, and related bits in place for handling JPEG-XL image support returning. While built by default, you may need to set chrome://flags/#enable-jxl-image-format in the interim at run-time to enjoy this JPEG-XL image decoding. That merge is in Chrome/Chromium 145.0.7632.0.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-Deprecating-JPEG-XL

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-Drops-JPEG-XL

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FSF-Slams-Google-JPEG-XL

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-JPEG-XL-Seconds

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/JPEG-XL-Possible-Chrome-Back

[6] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/740e9bb6eda1faec82bb17e11f87b7313b46a137

[7] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/2b547e7e232bbad5d46a04e466757dfc96de93f8

[8] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/8215ebd5eb9d45b42bbc68e1ceff039a319b35d6