Firefox gets JPEG XL, backed by a Rust decoder that replaced 100k lines of C++
Mozilla just posted its intent to ship JPEG XL, and with Chrome on board too, the format will hit all major browsers within the year. The twist: Firefox rejected the original 100,000-line multithreaded C++ codec as too risky, so Google Research built jxl-rs in Rust instead, now the core of Firefox's support. That's a readable signal — memory-safe decoders for browser attack surface. The big differentiator over AVIF is progressive rendering and stronger lossless compression, so developers get a real choice.