Chrome 145 Brings Back JPEG XL — But It's Still Off by Default

Open Chrome's release notes for version 145 and you'll find one line that most people scrolled past: JPEG XL decoding is back. No fanfare, no keynote, no blog post with a smiling product manager. Just a flag, buried in a changelog, quietly reversing one of the most contested decisions in the history of the web image format wars. Here's why that one line matters more than it looks. In 2022, Google killed JPEG XL in Chrome, effectively deciding the format's fate for the entire web — Chrome's market share was simply too large for JXL to survive without it. Photographers, archivists, and camera manufacturers who had bet on the format were left stranded. Three years later, Google reversed course. And the way it reversed course tells you something Chrome's official messaging doesn't: the feature is live in your browser right now, and almost nobody is using it, because it's switched off by default. That gap — shipped but not enabled — is the actual story, and it's the part most coverage gets wrong. ## What Actually Happened in Chrome 145 **What is JPEG XL, in short?** JPEG XL (file extension `.jxl`) is an image format developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the same body behind the original JPEG. It supports both lossy and lossless compression in one format, can losslessly repackage an existing JPEG into a smaller file with no quality loss, and handles wide color gamuts, HDR, transparency, and animation — features that the 1992-era JPEG standard was never built for. Chrome first shipped experimental JPEG XL support in 2021. In late 2022, with Chrome 110, Google removed it entirely, citing what its engineers called insufficient ecosystem interest — not enough sites, cameras, or tools were actually using it to justify the maintenance cost. That decision effectively stalled the format across the industry, since Firefox and other browsers had been waiting to see what Chrome would do. The reversal began quietly. In November 2025, Chromium's team accepted a new decoder implementation called jxl-rs — written in Rust rather than the original C++ codebase, which matters because Rust's memory-safety guarantees address the kind of security bugs that made Google cautious about niche image parsers in the first place. The decoder was merged into Chromium in January 2026, and it reached the stable channel with Chrome 145 on February 10, 2026. The catch: it ships disabled. You have to turn it on yourself, at `chrome://flags/#enable-jxl-image-format`. As of Chrome 151, several stable releases later, that has still not changed. ## Why Chrome Turned a Feature On and Then Left It Off This is the part that confuses people, and it's worth explaining plainly because it's not typical Chrome behavior for a shipped feature. Google has publicly tied default-on support to two conditions: a long-term commitment to maintaining the decoder, and JPEG XL meeting Chrome's standard launch criteria for new web platform features — the same bar any new CSS property or JavaScript API has to clear. Early testing of the Rust decoder put its performance at roughly 15–25% slower than the old C++ reference implementation, though a batch of more than two dozen optimization pull requests landed in December 2025 to narrow that gap. Confirmed working capabilities in the current build include ICC color profiles, animation, alpha transparency, wide-gamut Display P3 color, and HDR via PQ and HLG. In practical terms, this means Chrome is decoding-only right now. It can display a `.jxl` image correctly if a website serves one and you've flipped the flag, but Chrome itself still cannot create or export JPEG XL files. If you're a developer weighing whether to serve JXL to visitors today, the honest answer is: almost none of them will see it, because almost none of them have the flag on. ### ### Where Every Major Browser Actually Stands

Because Safari has supported JPEG XL since 2023, roughly one in five to one in four web users can already view it natively today, without doing anything. If Chrome flips its default — which Google has signaled is realistically a second-half-of-2026 possibility, not a certainty — that number would jump toward 85–90% of global browser traffic almost overnight, since Chromium-based browsers dominate the market. Until that switch happens, JPEG XL is a preview technology for enthusiasts and early-adopting developers, not a deployment target. ## What This Means If You're Not a Developer