GoKawiil
Tech News
Google says Chrome 155 will support decoding JPEG XL (.jxl) images, a format offering 30-50% better compression than JPEG, lossless compression, HDR support, and lossless JPEG transcoding. The decoder was rebuilt in Rust, via the jxl-rs project, to improve memory safety while matching the performance of existing C++ implementations.
A compression engineer revisits JPEG XL's standing on the Web, noting that despite its technical strengths over JPEG and WebP, Chrome dropped support in 2023. He points out that a new Rust-based JPEG XL decoder has since appeared in Firefox and parts of Chrome, partly to avoid repeating a security flaw once found in WebP, but argues this alone doesn't settle whether JPEG XL deserves broad Web adoption.