Why Google Chrome Dropped JPEG XL for AVIF

In late 2022, Google decided to deprecate and subsequently remove experimental support for JPEG XL (JXL) from the Chromium codebase, while doubling down on its support for AVIF. The decision stemmed from Chromium’s assessment that JPEG XL lacked sufficient ecosystem interest and failed to deliver enough incremental performance gains over existing formats like AVIF and WebP to justify the long-term maintenance burden and security footprint. This move highlighted a strategic divergence between the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) ecosystem favored by Google and the independent image-compression standards backed by various photographic and developer communities.

Chromium’s Stated Rationale

Google introduced experimental support for JPEG XL in Chrome 91 behind a feature flag. After roughly 18 months of evaluation, the Chromium team formally closed the issue and removed the flag in Chrome 110. The core reasons provided in the Chromium bug tracker focused on three main criteria:

• Insufficient Ecosystem Interest: Chromium engineers noted that the broader web ecosystem had not demonstrated sufficient demand for the format to graduate it to a fully supported web standard.
• Marginal Incremental Benefit: The team concluded that JPEG XL did not offer a significant enough compression or quality improvement over AVIF and WebP to justify the overhead of shipping an entirely new decoder.
• Maintenance and Attack Surface: Adding a new image format to a web browser introduces thousands of lines of parsing code, expanding the browser's potential security attack surface and creating an ongoing maintenance cost for rendering engines.

Strong Strategic Alignment with AVIF

While JPEG XL was removed, AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) continues to receive deep, active support across Google’s product lines. A major factor behind this divide is corporate alignment:

• Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia): Google is a founding member of AOMedia, the consortium that developed the royalty-free AV1 video codec. Because AVIF is essentially the still-image container for AV1, supporting AVIF directly reinforces Google's strategic investments in open-source video infrastructure across YouTube, Android, and Chrome.
• Hardware Acceleration Synergies: Modern GPUs, mobile system-on-chips (SoCs), and dedicated media processors increasingly include native hardware decoders for AV1 video. These same hardware decoders can often accelerate AVIF image decoding, reducing CPU load and extending battery life on mobile devices. JPEG XL, by contrast, relies purely on CPU-based software decoding, requiring complex multi-threading optimizations to achieve competitive decode speeds on web clients.

Overlap with Existing Formats

From Google's perspective, the combination of WebP and AVIF already solved the major pain points of web image delivery. WebP provides fast, ubiquitous replacement for legacy JPEGs and PNGs, while AVIF provides superior lossy compression at very low bitrates, high dynamic range (HDR), and wide color gamut (WCG) support.

Although JPEG XL offers distinct technical capabilities—most notably lossless recompression of existing JPEGs (reducing file sizes by roughly 20% without generation loss) and extremely high-fidelity photographic archival—Google determined these features primarily benefited photographers and storage providers rather than the typical web browsing experience.

The Divergent Industry Landscape

Google’s deprecation of JPEG XL remains one of the most debated modern browser decisions. While Google prioritized AVIF, other major players have taken different approaches. Apple introduced support for JPEG XL across Safari, iOS, and macOS, catering heavily to photography and pro-creative workflows. The decision highlights how browser vendors weigh different priorities: Chrome prioritized software minimalism and synergy with the AV1 video pipeline, while competitors and image fidelity advocates prioritized JPEG XL's advanced archival capabilities and legacy JPEG compatibility.