Apple is gonna do what apple wants.
JXL was dead. Apple is who brought it back to life[1], and the only reason Chrome resurrected JXL, and now Firefox followed their path, is because Apple pushed JXL support to a billion plus devices.
I know people like complaining about Apple, but there's a "read the room" kind of moment where people just seem to either not know the context or are just knee jerking.
[1] Worth noting that Apple used the reference implementation, libjxl, and that project still remains the reference implementation with the Rust port being experimental (and of course Apple deployed JXL support over a year before the Rust port even existed). Maybe they'll switch to it at some point, but it's a bit premature to complain about.
Which is to say, Chrome followed Firefox here.
(Yes, I know Google Research implemented jxl-rs, but then, they also implemented jxl. Chrome’s position appears independent of them.)
No, it was actually the PDF Association.
They added JXL to the PDF standard.
If google wanted to maintain support for displaying PDFs, they would need to add support for JXL.
2015-2021: Google and Cloudinary develop the technical foundations, work on standardization with the JPEG group and write the reference implementation
2021: Chrome and Firefox introduce experimental support
2022: The Chrome team decides to remove the experimental support, citing lack of interest in the ecosystem
2023: Apple surprises by shipping support in all their products
2024: Firefox says they don't want the attack surface of 100K lines of multithreaded C++ but they will ship support if Google implements a Rust version
September 2025: Google delivers jxl-rs v0.1.0 (a Rust implementation)
October 2025: The PDF Association announces they want to include the format in PDF, citing the need for HDR support in particular
November 2025: The Chrome team reverses its position, citing Safari support, Firefox's new stance, Interop proposals and the PDF announcement.
So while Google played the largest part by far in making JPEG-XL a thing, Apple probably played an outsize role in getting it adopted so fast. But its long-term fate? Who knows... The PDF Association might well have adopted JPEG-XL without Apple: they cited HDR support, wide-gamut, ultra-high resolution and channel number, not "works on iOS". And having it as the format for HDR in PDF would have forced Chrome's hand no matter what Apple did.
(Small heads up: the "anyone with a clue agrees with me" framing is more grating than useful.)
> No, it was actually the PDF Association.
The PDF Association didn't adopt JPEG-XL until September 2025. By then, Apple had been shipping JPEG-XL in Safari for two years [1]. So there's that.
[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/14205/news-from-wwdc23-webkit-featur...