According to the latest update from Mozilla engineer Timothy, the Firefox team has confirmed plans to enable JPEG XL image decoding by default across all platforms, starting with the official release of Firefox v157. Mozilla’s official announcement signals that the browser’s JPEG XL support has now reached production-grade quality and is ready for public release.
What Is the JPEG XL Image Format?
JPEG XL (file extension .jxl) is a new image encoding format standardized by the JPEG Committee, designed as a universal codec capable of replacing older formats like JPEG, PNG, and GIF all at once. JPEG XL supports both lossy and lossless compression, with a particular emphasis on high fidelity, efficient compression, fast decoding, and modern feature support.
At equivalent visual quality, JPEG XL images are typically 50% to 60% smaller than traditional JPEG files and 20% to 30% smaller than WebP images. In most real-world scenarios, JPEG XL performs slightly better than or on par with AVIF, while in lossless mode, it generally outperforms PNG.
Firefox Has Undergone Extensive Testing
Firefox has supported JPEG XL in its Nightly builds for a considerable time already. Following extensive testing, Mozilla engineers now consider the implementation to have reached production-grade quality. As a result, starting with Firefox v157, the browser will enable JPEG XL support by default across all platforms – users will no longer need to manually enable an experimental flag to decode JPEG XL images.
The main remaining limitation concerns HDR: for HDR images, Firefox will continue to display them in SDR format for the time being. Beyond that single caveat, Firefox’s JPEG XL support is already quite comprehensive, including support for animation and progressive rendering. Other browsers, by comparison, either have yet to support JPEG XL at all or offer incomplete implementations – Safari, for instance, lacks support for progressive rendering and animation, while Google has yet to reintroduce JPEG XL support in Chrome.
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