> That's rich coming from the company that tried to kill it
This post is written by three of the authors of the JPEG XL spec, implementors of the reference and rust implementations of libjxl, and...longtime google employees.
For context, Google initially refused to merge JpegXL as a strategy play to promote AVIF, which was in use by other teams (i think Photos?). Internally, chrome engineers were supportive of jxl but were overridden by leadership.
I guess today’s post represents a change.
I don’t have any public evidence to support my claim, sorry. Take it or leave it
We (Google) built JPEG XL (together with Cloudinary). The main photography mode and the JPEG compatibility mode is from Google.
Chrome decided not to be an early adopter for good reasons that they have publicly documented, but that did nothing to JPEG XL. Particularly, it did not kill JPEG XL. Others, DNG, DICOM, PDF, EPUB, iOS, Safari, etc. integrated it early regardless.
I'm generally pretty pro-AI, but I find this icky. Of course, I wouldn't have noticed except the whiteboard drawing seemed not quite right, so I'll probably be fooled in the future.
Huge fan of JXL, but this article feels pretty AI sloppy. Not much said here, coming from the google blog I was hoping for some news about how they are pushing the format forward by introducing decoders in to Android and enabling on Chrome.
Android is the only mainstream OS that does not support JPEG XL right now.
Mostly off topic, but why is the spec for JPEG and JPEG XL paywalled? I wouldn't call them open standards if they're not available free-of-charge to the public.
Can someone explain where are we at the image processing world/timeline? Why do coding tools suggest to me .avif and .webp, and the support of these lags in Windows OS and then we have things like JpegXL and Jpeg2000 or whatever others are there flying around? Why is it so hard to find our next "jpg format"?
The obvious AI headings, pointless genned image of people (I'm starting to think islam had a point with discouraging depictions of human figures), and especially the blurry, artifacted, distractingly skeuomorphic diagram, with random wire traces going everywhere... this is a technical blog, not an investor sales pitch! Every time I see one of these, I have to double-check for a second if I'm not on some phishing SEO site!
If even Google, previously a gold standard of technical writing, is falling prey to this kind of laziness, then I have nothing to worry about -- knowing how to write without a language model in the driver's seat is gonna be a top tier skill in the future...
A damn shame too, as I've been following the progress of JXL in the standardization pipeline for a few years now and was quite interested in the historical breakdown, but all that's gonna stick with me from this is the disrespect I felt as a reader.
Conveniently forgetting how they removed the jpeg-xl support from the chrome codebase despite overwhelming developer backlash that they then proceeded to ignore for over a year.
They literally tried to kill it - stating (nonsensical) reasons why it was obsolete and unneeded.
And since now the rest of the world have adopted it despite Google, they have crawled out of their slime pits praising themselves for its development with only a passing mention of cloudinary?
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 42.2 ms ] threadThis post is written by three of the authors of the JPEG XL spec, implementors of the reference and rust implementations of libjxl, and...longtime google employees.
I guess today’s post represents a change.
I don’t have any public evidence to support my claim, sorry. Take it or leave it
Chrome decided not to be an early adopter for good reasons that they have publicly documented, but that did nothing to JPEG XL. Particularly, it did not kill JPEG XL. Others, DNG, DICOM, PDF, EPUB, iOS, Safari, etc. integrated it early regardless.
I'm generally pretty pro-AI, but I find this icky. Of course, I wouldn't have noticed except the whiteboard drawing seemed not quite right, so I'll probably be fooled in the future.
Here's a blog post by him: https://cloudinary.com/blog/2026-the-year-of-jpeg-xl
Android is the only mainstream OS that does not support JPEG XL right now.
The obvious AI headings, pointless genned image of people (I'm starting to think islam had a point with discouraging depictions of human figures), and especially the blurry, artifacted, distractingly skeuomorphic diagram, with random wire traces going everywhere... this is a technical blog, not an investor sales pitch! Every time I see one of these, I have to double-check for a second if I'm not on some phishing SEO site!
If even Google, previously a gold standard of technical writing, is falling prey to this kind of laziness, then I have nothing to worry about -- knowing how to write without a language model in the driver's seat is gonna be a top tier skill in the future...
A damn shame too, as I've been following the progress of JXL in the standardization pipeline for a few years now and was quite interested in the historical breakdown, but all that's gonna stick with me from this is the disrespect I felt as a reader.
They literally tried to kill it - stating (nonsensical) reasons why it was obsolete and unneeded.
And since now the rest of the world have adopted it despite Google, they have crawled out of their slime pits praising themselves for its development with only a passing mention of cloudinary?
Sickening.