Chromium plans to ship JPEG XL image decoding in Blink
The engine will decode image/jxl via the memory-safe jxl-rs Rust library, matching support already present in Gecko and WebKit.
Chromium has filed an intent to ship JPEG XL decoding in Blink, adding native support for image/jxl across Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView.
The implementation uses jxl-rs, a pure Rust decoder chosen for memory safety. JPEG XL, standardized as ISO/IEC 18181, targets better compression and progressive display, and covers wide color gamut, HDR, high bit depth, and animation. Web platform tests and a shared conformance corpus back the work; W3C TAG review issues are marked addressed.
Interop risk is low. Gecko already ships the format and is moving toward the Rust decoder as well. WebKit ships it today with the C++ libjxl stack. Developer signal is strongly positive. API behavior for existing content is unchanged; this is a new codec, not a breaking change for WebView apps.
Blink API owners cleared the intent with three LGTMs. Yoav Weiss called it an exciting platform addition that should improve compression while lowering encoding CPU cost. With Chrome aligned to the other major engines, sites will be able to serve JPEG XL without engine-specific gaps once the feature reaches stable.