On the web alone it should be close to a billion users with support for JXL due to Safari’s market share.

[1]: https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-how-it-started-how-its-g...

This is also why Firefox doesn't support it by default (IIRC it doesn't even link against libjpegxl by default in release builds – only nightly ones).

There is nothing preventing the Chrome or Firefox people from revisiting all of this in the future.

It seems to me the Rust implementation of JPEG XL is by far the best path forward for broad JPEG XL support in Firefox, Chrome, and other browsers. While Rust is of course not a complete guarantee there will never be any security issues, it does eliminate virtually all of the major exploits that have targeted image decoders in the past. Both Firefox and Chrome have expressed interest in this.

- Mac OS, iOS, and Safari support JPEG-XL

- Windows has first party JPEG-XL support as of this year (admittedly it's opt in rather than default)

- Essentially every major image processing app, editor, or drawing app supports JPEG-XL

- Firefox has preliminary support for JPEG-XL gated behind a feature flag and the nightly release.

- The JPEG-XL team is writing a direct port of the reference libjxl library into rust[1]. There already exists a third party rust port by some of the mainline contributors and it has ironed out a lot of the issues with the porting process prior to this mainline port. This first party rust port is intended to be gradually brought up to a hardened, production ready state.

- Mozilla has stated they have no objections to fully adopting JPEG-XL in Firefox once the rust port is production ready [2].

The last major barriers other than getting the rust code production ready will be chrome and android's first party support/adoption.

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TLDR: JPEG-XL is very much not dead and instead people are nose down working hard to continue pushing its adoption forward.

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1. https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs

2. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064