Mozilla's Firefox 156 release improves large JPEG handling by using libjpeg-turbo's IDCT scaling during decoding instead of loading full-size images first, cutting memory use up to 20 times and doubling decode speed. The update also makes the built-in PDF.js viewer start up to 45% faster by loading its background worker earlier, and expands sponsored address bar suggestions to France, Germany and Italy. Firefox 157, due in about two weeks, is expected to add support for the JPEG XL image format.
news.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-16
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.
giannirosato.com
· 2026-09-14
Mozilla announced it will turn on JPEG XL decoding by default across all Firefox platforms starting with version 157, using its Rust-based jxl-rs decoder. The feature has been available as an opt-in Labs setting since Firefox 152 and behind a hidden preference since earlier releases, and now gains multithreaded decoding to match performance with Safari's implementation.
groups.google.com
· 2026-08-25
GoKawiil