It looks very likely chromium will be using jxl-rs crate for this feature [0]. My personal suspicion is that they've just been waiting for it to good enough to integrate and they didn't want to promise anything until it was ready (hence the long silence).
That was Mozilla's stance. Google was thoroughly hostile towards it. They closed the original issue citing a lack of interest among users, despite the users themselves complaining loudly against it. The only thing I'm not sure about is why they decided to reopen it. They may have decided that they didn't need this much bad PR. Or someone inside may have been annoyed by it just as much as we are.
PS: I'm a bit too sleepy to search for the original discussion. Apologies for not linking it here.
> The only thing I'm not sure about is why they decided to reopen it.
It's almost certainly due to the PDF Association adding JPEG XL as a supported image format to the ISO standard for PDFs; considering Google's 180 on JPEG XL support came just a few days after the PDF Association's announcement.
That would make sense, since they would then need support for JXL for the embedded PDF viewer anyway. Unless they want it to choke on valid PDFs that include JXL images.
I see! Thanks for pointing out this very interesting correlation. So we got something better only because someone else equally influential forced their hand. Otherwise the users be damned, for all they care, it seems.
I have been relentlessly shilling JPEG-XL's technological superiority especially against their joke of an alternative and a stain on the Internet they call WebP
I designed WebP lossless alone. The rest of the WebP folks added a RIFF header and an artificial size limitation (16383x16383) to match with the size limitation of lossy WebP.
In JPEG XL I believe I had more influence on the lossy ("VarDCT") format than anyone else, but stayed relatively far from the lossless part (except the delta palette, two predictors, 2d lz-codes, and a few other smaller things). I believe Jon and Luca had most influence there.
"Code frequency" for jxl-rs shows no activity from Aug 2021 to Aug 2024, then steady work with a couple of spurts. That's both a longer hiatus and a longer period of subsequent activity (a year+ ago isn't "recently" in my book.) What data have you based your observation on?
[0] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40168998#comment507