Safari 17 & WebKit add JPEG XL support

Apple has announced that it has turned on support for JPEG XL, a format that Google refused to support in Chrome last year, in its new Safari 17 browser and WebKit support. Firefox, on the other hand, provides support for JPEG XL in night assemblies, with Mozilla retaining a neutral position on its promotion.

Following the removal of experimental support of JPEG XL from the CHROMIUM code base due to a lack of sufficient interest in the ecosystem format, the situation has changed. Positive reviews from web-developers and communities, including Facebook, Adobe, Intel, Vesa, Krita, The Guardian, Libvips, Cloudinary, Shopify, and the Free Software Foundation, have been received since the format was included in Safari. However, requests to return the JPEG XL Code to Chromium are still being received by Google.

One of Google’s arguments against the inclusion of JPEG XL was the lack of sufficient additional advantages compared to existing formats. Nevertheless, advantages such as a decrease in size to 60% compared to JPEG images with identical quality, advanced capabilities like HDR, animation, transparency, progressive loading mode, smooth quality deterioration with a decrease in bitrate, compression of JPEG without loss, support of up to 4099 channels, and large ranges of depths of color have been mentioned on the application page for adding support to JPEG XL to the BLINK engine.

Overall, the renewed interest and support for JPEG XL from various parties have boosted its chances of being included as a supported format in future browsers.

/Reports, release notes, official announcements.