To the frustration of many developers and end-users, back in 2022 Google deprecated JPEG-XL support in Chrome/Chromium and proceeded to remove the support . That decision was widely slammed and ultimately Google said they may end up reconsidering it . In November there was renewed activity and interest in restoring JPEG-XL within Google's image web browser and as of yesterday the code was merged.

JPEG-XL image support is back in the very latest Google Chrome/Chromium codebase. Back in December they merged jxl-rs as a pure Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder from the official libjxl organization. At the end of December they did more JPEG-XL plumbing with the enums and build flags for the support.

Now as of yesterday they wired up the JXL decoder ! The jxl-rs-powered JPEG-XL image decoding is gated by the enable_jxl_decoder build flag but it's enabled by default. The decode support is wired up with proper MIME type handling (image/jxl), there is chrome://flags UI coverage, and related bits in place for handling JPEG-XL image support returning. While built by default, you may need to set chrome://flags/#enable-jxl-image-format in the interim at run-time to enjoy this JPEG-XL image decoding. That merge is in Chrome/Chromium 145.0.7632.0.