Google decided to drop experimental support for JPEG XL in Chrome browser and completely remove support for it in version 110 (until now, JPEG XL support was disabled by default and required changing the setting in chrome://flags). One of the developers of Chrome gave the reasons for this decision:
- Experimental flags and code should not remain indefinitely.
- There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL.
- The new image format does not provide enough additional benefits over existing formats to enable it by default.
- Removing the flag and code in Chrome 110 reduces the maintenance burden and allows you to focus on improving existing formats in Chrome.
Meanwhile, in the bug tracker, this problem is one of the most active, many large corporations, including Meta and Intel, have shown interest in the format, and it supports many features that are not available simultaneously in any of the existing widespread image formats such as JPEG, GIF, PNG and Google's own WEBP, including HDR, near-infinite sizes, up to 4099 channels, animation, wide range of color depths, progressive loading, lossless JPEG compression (up to 21% JPEG downscaling with the ability to restore the original state), smooth degradation in bitrate reduction and, finally, it is royalty-free and completely open source. There is only one known patent for JPEG XL, but it has "prior art", so its application is a big question.
Source: opennet.ru