Last month at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced its support of JPEG XL. As someone who helped create JPEG XL, I don’t think anyone was more pleased than me to hear this news.

For a standard that’s not even three years old, this was a major win. Or rather, it’s a win for the web community, for photographers and artists, as well as for those of us who created the codec.

Before diving into what the Apple announcement means for JPEG XL moving forward, let’s take a quick look at its origin.

JPEG XL development began in 2018, when the JPEG committee launched a call for proposals on next-generation image compression, to which seven proposals were submitted. Of the seven two stood out: Google’s PIK and Cloudinary’s FUIF proposal. The ingredients from both proposals were eventually combined and refined to design a new codec that was better than the sum of its parts.

By the end of 2020, the main technical work was done and the bitstream was frozen, i.e., no more changes would be made that would change the format from the decoder point of view.

In November 2020 Cloudinary added JXL support and early in 2021, I wrote the blog post Time for Next-Gen Codecs to Dethrone JPEG. In the piece I argued that modern codecs like JPEG XL can bring many benefits, and expressed the hope that they would be widely adopted.

In early April 2021, the Chrome browser added experimental support (behind a flag), even before the JPEG XL standard was officially published. (The final draft had been submitted to ISO, but it would still take until March 2022 before it was approved and published as the international standard ISO/IEC 18181.) Firefox followed suit quickly and added experimental support. Things were looking good.

Then, on Halloween 2022, Chrome developers suddenly announced that they would be removing JPEG XL support. This decision was quite unexpected and controversial. In my blog The Case for JPEG XL, I argued why this decision should be reversed. In December, Chrome developers provided test results that were used to justify the decision and invited feedback. I analyzed the results and pointed out several methodological flaws and oversights. So far, my feedback has been ignored.

Beyond browsers, adoption of JPEG XL continued, in particular in image authoring software like Serif Affinity, Adobe Camera Raw, GIMP, Krita, etc. Unfortunately, Chrome’s d