There is a very specific type of tech enthusiast who loves losing battles. You know the type. They’re the ones still crying over Windows Phone, mourning the headphone jack, and—most annoyingly—campaigning for JPEG XL.
Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate: JPEG XL is dead, Jim. Google killed it, Apple ignored it, and the web has happily moved on. Yet, every few months, a fresh wave of forum posts and blog diatribes pops up, acting like a resurrected image format is going to save us all from the tyranny of WebP and AVIF.
Spoiler alert: It won’t. And frankly, clinging to it is just embarrassing at this point.
If you read through the technical chest-beating—like Gianni Rosato’s recent breakdown on why this format needs to stay buried—the pro-JXL crowd sounds less like web developers and more like religious zealots clutching ancient texts. They’ll bend your ear for forty minutes about mathematically superior compression ratios, legacy support, and how JPEG XL can magically transcode old JPEGs without losing a single pixel of precious data.
It’s an impressive party trick. Too bad nobody’s asking for it.
The web doesn’t run on what looks prettiest in a spreadsheet comparison. It runs on momentum, browser support, and—let’s be honest—whatever big tech decides to push. Google took one look at JPEG XL, decided it competed with their own pet projects, and effectively barred the door. Love it or hate it, that’s the reality. When Chrome says no, your fancy new standard is basically shouting into a pillow.
More importantly, we’re living in a completely different world now. The goalposts have shifted. While the JPEG XL fanboys are arguing over decimal points in compression efficiency, the rest of the industry is sprinting headfirst into an AI-dominated landscape.
Think about it. We aren’t just serving static photos anymore; we’re generating billions of hyper-detailed, hallucinated textures on the fly using generative AI models. The bottleneck of the modern web isn’t saving two kilobytes on a compressed photo of your lunch. It’s rendering, streaming, and processing complex neural assets. AVIF and WebP already handle the heavy lifting of traditional web traffic just fine, while next-gen generative codecs and latent-space streaming are looming on the horizon. JPEG XL is fighting a war that ended three years ago.
It reminds me of the Blu-ray loyalists who insisted physical media was making a comeback right as Netflix streaming swallowed the planet. Sure, technically, your uncompressed disc has a higher bitrate. But nobody cares because convenience and ‘good enough’ always win. WebP is good enough. AVIF is good enough. And if we really want better image quality, throwing more compute at AI upscaling is a far more pragmatic bet than waiting for Safari to finally patch in support for a format nobody outside of a Reddit echo chamber has ever heard of.
So let’s stop wasting energy playing necromancer with web standards. Let JPEG XL rest in peace alongside Google Glass and QuickTime.
Here’s my hot take: If you’re still wasting keystrokes advocating for JPEG XL in 2026, you don’t actually care about the web—you just want to feel smarter than the engineers building it. Move on.