JPEG XL in 2026: what it is and when browsers support it

JPEG XL (JXL) is the successor everyone wanted: it compresses photos 20–30% better than AVIF, handles high bit-depth and HDR natively, and even recompresses existing JPEGs losslessly — meaning you can shrink a JPEG without decoding it first.

So why is adoption slow? JXL was removed from Chromium in 2022 due to ecosystem politics, and while it is back behind a flag, it is still not enabled by default in Chrome. Safari enabled it in 17.0, and Firefox has had it behind a flag for years.

The practical answer in 2026: use WebP for broad reach, use AVIF when you want the smallest files and your audience is modern, and reach for JXL for archival and high-detail work — or when you control the browser (kiosks, Electron apps, your own app).

In TrueSmush we added JXL because "best compression" matters: in our tests a 3.3 MB noise-heavy PNG became a 449 KB JXL (−86.5%). If your visitors are on Safari 17+ or Chrome with the flag on, they will see the savings; everyone else falls back to WebP/AVIF gracefully.