JPEG XL in Chrome 145: what it means for web developers

Chrome 145 quietly shipped something big: a native JPEG XL decoder. After dropping JXL support in 2022 and years of community pushback, Google reversed course. JXL is now viable in production. What changed Before Chrome 145, JPEG XL had only Safari support (~14%). Now with Chrome on board, you're looking at 70%+ coverage overnight. Firefox has JXL in nightly builds. Edge follows Chrome. The holdout is older Chrome versions. Why JXL is different from AVIF and WebP AVIF WebP JPEG XL Compression vs JPEG ~50% 25-34% 35-55% Encode speed Slow Fast Fast Lossless Yes Yes Yes Progressive decode No No Yes Lossless JPEG recompression No No Yes The lossless JPEG recompression is unique — you can transcode existing JPEGs to JXL with zero quality loss and ~20% size reduction. No other format can do this. Should you use JXL today? For new projects: yes, with a JPEG fallback. The <picture> element handles this cleanly: <picture> <source srcset="image.jxl" type="image/jxl"> <source