Google has decided to drop experimental support for the JPEG XL format in the Chrome browser and completely remove it in version 110 (up until now, JPEG XL support was disabled by default and required a change in chrome://flags). One of the Chrome developers cited the reasons for this decision:
- Experimental flags and code should not remain indefinitely.
- There is insufficient interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experiments with JPEG XL.
- The new image format does not provide enough additional advantages over existing formats to warrant enabling it by default.
- Removing the flag and code in Chrome 110 reduces maintenance overhead and allows a focus on improving existing formats in Chrome.
Meanwhile, this issue remains one of the most active in the bug tracker, with many major corporations, including Meta and Intel, showing interest in the format. It supports many features not available in any existing widely-used image formats, such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, and Google's own WEBP, including HDR, almost infinite sizes, up to 4099 channels, animation, a wide range of color depths, progressive loading, lossless JPEG compression (reducing JPEG size by 21% with the ability to restore the original state), smooth quality degradation when reducing bitrate, and finally, it is free and fully open-source. There is a single known patent for JPEG XL, but it has "prior art," so its application is in question.
Source: opennet.ru
