this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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Because Google didn’t invent it, and Google decides what does and doesn’t get added to the Internet.
Google were literally one of the three organisations who worked on the standard, and the top contributor to the reference implementation works there.
And then they killed it. It was Google pulling support in Chrome that killed JPEG-XL’s momentum.
It was the Joint Picture Experts Group that invented it, so Google had no ownership over it, unlike WebP.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL
No, JPEG called for submission of proposals to define the new standard, and Google submitted its own PIK format, which provided much of the basis for what would become the JXL standard (the other primary contribution being Cloudinary's FUIF).
Ultimately, I think most of the discussion around browser support thinks too small. Image formats are used for web display, sure, but they're also used for so many other things. Digital imaging is used in medicine (where TIFF dominates), print, photography, video, etc.
I'm excited about JPEG XL as a replacement for TIFF and raw photography sensor data, including for printing and medical imaging. WebP, AVIF, HEIF, etc. really are only aiming for replacing web distributed images on a screen.
So Google contributed to it, but ultimately didn’t invent it and doesn’t own it. In other words, what I said.
As opposed to WebP, which not only do they own, they also own several patents for that cover the entire bitstream. They offer a patent license that is conditional on not suing them. So they basically own and control WebP entirely. They do not own, nor do they control, JPEG-XL. Google owns patents that cover a portion of JPEG-XL, but don’t have full control.
It's different people who develop and who decide.