It isn’t often that new image formats land in browsers. In the early 2000s we had JPEG, GIF, and PNG. The 2010s gave us WebP, which was a modest step up from JPEG. But the 2020s have given us two new image formats that are a big step up from previous formats: AVIF and JPEG XL.
We shipped AVIF back in 2021, and today we posted our intent to ship JPEG XL. Chrome are also intending to ship, and given there’s already a partial implementation in Safari, the format will be supported across browsers before the end of the year.
Shipping JPEG XL securely
We added experimental support for JPEG XL behind a flag back in 2021. But, at 100,000 lines of multithreaded C++, we were concerned about the attack surface this added to Firefox.
So, we laid down a challenge to the JPEG XL team at Google Research: Build a safe, performant, compact, and compatible JPEG XL decoder in Rust, and we’ll ship it. That challenge was met; Google Research built jxl-rs, and it’s the core of our JPEG XL support in Firefox.
