Google is once again accused of snubbing the JPEG XL image format

The problem with codecs is that you basically need to double-encode/store etc. until you have effectively 100% support in your visitors’ browsers, and that’s uneconomical for all but the largest sites.

As the maintainer of Chrome (and to some extent even all browsers based on Blink), Google currently really does have the power to kill web standards, especially those that have a (less efficient) alternative.

This would be true even if the majority of people would be willing to change browsers over an image codec, which they’re almost certainly not.

The problem is that, as the dominant browser vendor, it doesn’t hurt them to not support it.

For their own bandwidth efficiency, they can use AVIF, which is supported in Chromium; about everybody else’s they don’t need to care.