JPEG XL Is Worth It

Today is going to be a short post about JPEG XL. For those who don’t know, it’s an image format that can do everything PNG, JPEG, and GIF can do, but better, and smaller. It can do lossless and lossy compression, it can do animations with transparency, it has progressive decoding. And Google wants to kill it.

I won’t linger on the quantified benefits and technical details, as I want to share something else, but if you’re interested here is a community website with excellent comparisons with other formats, a JPEG XL test page, and a video on the topic if that’s more your jam.

How Is Google Killing It?#

If you checked out that JPEG XL test page, you probably saw this:

Chrome removed JPEG XL support in February 2023 (and by extension, all Chromium-based browsers too), and Firefox being the Google-funded puppet they are, wanted to remain “neutral” on the topic. Safari does support the image format, so kudos to Apple for that.

So how do you use this image format if most of the big browsers don’t support it? With browser extensions! Here is one for Chrome and Firefox. In my short time testing them, they are not perfect. They don’t support animations, and they sometimes bug out with <picture> elements like on the test page, but they’re a free and easy way to add support to your browser.

If you want better JPEG XL support and you’re willing to change browsers, here’s a probably exhaustive list of the ones that do:

And if you have your own blog or website, try to use JPEG XLs! With a <picture> element you can have a fallback for browsers that don’t support it. Here is a sample code for your use.

<picture>
	<source srcset="image.jxl" type="image/jxl">
	<img src="image.png">
</picture>