2026, the Year of JPEG XL

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🤖 AI disclaimer: This article uses quite a few em dashes and emojis — but it was written by a human.

The saga of JXL adoption has been a surprisingly dramatic one. While Google was one of the main proponents of the format — it was created in a collaboration between Google Research and Cloudinary, with guidance from the broader JPEG committee — this didn’t imply that Google Chrome would become an early adopter. But now it looks like in 2026 all pieces of the puzzle might finally come together.

In past blog posts, I have made the case for JPEG XL several times already. In a nutshell: superior image compression performance while ensuring a high fidelity (in particular for HDR images), legacy-friendly reversible JPEG recompression, and a very complete feature set including progressive decoding make it the most promising modern image format.

Cloudinary supports JXL since November 2020 already. But of course server-side support alone is not sufficient to be able to actually use it on the Web…

Browser Support, a Rollercoaster Ride 🎢

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The story of JXL browser support has been one with quite some ups and downs. Let me give a brief summary of the main turning points.

🚀 Promising Start

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In a promising start, experimental Chrome support for JXL was implemented in May 2021, followed by Firefox in July 2021. This was very early — the standard itself wasn’t officially published until March 2022, though the “final draft” (FDIS) of the file format specification was approved by the committee in April 2021, so the format was effectively frozen already.

In both browsers it was disabled by default and a configuration flag had to be manually changed to actually get JXL support. The general expectation was that this was temporary, and once the standard would be published and the implementation would be mature and well-tested, the feature would be enabled by default.

The libjxl implementation improved, bugs were squashed, the standard was finalized. Things were looking good.

🎃 Halloween Announcement

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But then, exactly on Halloween 2022, a controversial announcement was made by the Chrome developers, saying they were planning to remove JXL support, citing “not enough interest from the entire ecosystem."

Shortly afterwards, Mozilla announced in January 2023 that their position on JXL was “neutral," i.e., they wouldn’t add support for it unless the other browsers would do that.

In February 2023, all JXL code was removed from Chrome.

⚰️ JXL is Dead

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At this point, it looked like the story was basically over for JXL support in browsers, and thus probably for JXL in general as a widely-supported image format. After all, browsers are such a critical part of so many workflows and use cases, that no image format can be considered ubiquitous and interoperable if it doesn’t have universal browser support.

Considering the market share of Chrome and Chromium-derived browsers such as Edge, a veto from Chrome essentially is a death sentence for any web feature.

🍎 Resurrection by Apple

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In a plot twist, in June 2023 Apple announced that they were planning to add JXL support to their entire ecosystem, including iOS, macOS, and Safari. In September 2023, JXL support was rolled out in Safari.

The following months we saw a rapid increase in the number of image requests coming from browsers with JXL support in Cloudinary’s overall traffic.

📈 Safari Rollout

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The proportion of web clients with JXL support jumped from only a fraction of a percent beginning of September 2023 to a peak of around 25% around Christmas. It slowly grew to around 28% and has been fluctuating around that ratio for about two years now, with peaks above 30%.

(As a side note: This 28% browser support number is higher than the 12% reported by “Can I Use” or as cited in Arjen Karel’s excellent recent blog post about JPEG XL and Core Web Vitals. Likely this is caused by North America and Europe/U.K. being overrepresented in Cloudinary’s traffic — together over 75% of our traffic — which bumps up the proportion of iPhones in our logs.)

(As another side note: In case you’re wondering where those peaks are coming from: on desktop, about 10% of browsers support JXL, while on mobile, it is about 40%. On working days about 60% of our traffic is from mobile devices, while on weekends and holidays it is around 75%. The plot shows the numbers for Tuesdays, so it mostly shows “working day traffic," except around holidays. In particular around the end of the year, this causes spikes in the plot.)

In the same period, the number of JXL images Cloudinary delivered per day also increased significantly, from practically none (around 50,000/day) in the summer of 2023 to around one billion per day at the time of writing. The spikes in overall amount of traffic are always...