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it home reported on september 5 that technology media phoronix published a blog post yesterday (september 4), reporting that google is considering using the rust language to write a jpeg-xl image decoder for the firefox browser.

mozilla's firefox cto bobby holley expressed support yesterday for the development of a rust-based jpeg-xl image decoder for the firefox browser.

in his pull request proposal titled "firefox browser will consider rust implementation of jpeg-xl", it home translated it as follows:

we have had a very productive conversation over the past few months with the jpeg-xl team at google research about the future of jpeg-xl support in firefox.

the decoder has over 100,000 lines of multi-threaded c++ code, so we have long been concerned that the attack surface of the reference decoder (currently built into the firefox nightly preview option) is too large.

to address this problem, the google team agreed to apply their expertise to build a safe, performant, compact, and compatible jpeg-xl decoder in rust and integrate the decoder into firefox.

if they successfully contribute an implementation that meets these features and meets our normal production requirements, we will release it.

as to whether this format can become the universal replacement for jpeg as some hope, time will tell.

if this were true, it would be very unfortunate to introduce potential memory safety vulnerabilities in the countless applications that will eventually need to support it.

a safe, fast, and battle-tested rust decoder from the original team would greatly reduce this likelihood, so we are using our influence to encourage progress in this area.

introduction to jpeg-xl

jpeg xl is a royalty-free bitmap file format that supports both lossy and lossless compression. it is designed to outperform existing bitmap formats and become their universal replacement.

google removed experimental support for the jpeg-xl image format in 2022, citing factors such as "the overall ecosystem's lack of interest in the jpeg-xl format, making it difficult to continue promoting experiments."

if the rust version of the decoder experiment on firefox is successful, perhaps google chrome will reconsider supporting jpeg-xl.