I do find their decision to drop JPEG-XL from Chromium problematic because it was clearly an example of them ignoring everyone else, showing the limits of Chromium’s collaborative decision making. However, “pushing their own formats” wasn’t one of their reasons:
- Google also dropped plans to make its WebP2 project a real image format at around the same time
- Google helped define the JPEG-XL spec
- Google developed the Butteraugli project, which was incorporated into JPEG-XL
- The reference implementation (libjxl) is mostly a Google project
Google is a big part of JPEG-XL, yet Google dropped it along with its own WebP2 a while after seeing AVIF gain widespread support.
I previously shared my thoughts on the issue in this post: Google drops Webp2 and JPEG-XL.