Programmer Humor

Google.

Google didn't kill JPEG XL. It might have set browser support back some, but there's still a place for JPEG XL to take over.

All the modern video-derived formats (webp, heif/heic, avif) tend to be optimized for screen resolutions. But for print photography (including just plain old regular photography that wants to keep the option open of maybe printing some of the images eventually), the higher resolutions and higher quality stretches the limits of where those codecs actually perform well (in terms of file sizes, perceived quality, computational power of coding or decoding).

JPEG XL knocks the other modern images out of the water at those print resolutions and color spaces and quality. It's not just for photography, either: medical imaging, archiving, printing, etc., all use much higher resolutions that what is supported on any screen.

And perhaps most importantly for future support, the iPhone now supports taking images in JPEG XL. If that becomes a dominant format for photographic workflows, to replace stuff like DNG and other raw formats, browser support won't hold back the format's adoption.