Developer tools
Chrome Spent 5 Years Telling Everyone Nobody Wanted JPEG XL. In 2026 It Shipped It Anyway
In 2022 Google pulled JPEG XL from Chrome, saying there was not enough interest from the ecosystem, while Meta, Adobe, Intel, Shopify, and The Guardian were on the record asking for it. Now Chrome 155 ships a JPEG XL decoder, rewritten in Rust, and the reasons the format was killed look very different in hindsight. I went through the whole timeline, the compression numbers, and who actually wanted this.