"Required" is a strong word. More than enough people use Chrome as a PDF viewer that if Google decided to not support JXL, you'd see ~0 PDFs with it.

Another giant codec is only a huge risk if you run the decoder in the renderer process, which they say in the linked thread they do, but I don't see a sane reason why.

I'm sure if they asked the secret Gemini 4.0 AGI to use their existing very good sandbox to throw all the decoders in their own process and only share the image buffers, it could do it in a few hours.

> Removed because having yet another giant C codec was a huge risk

Removed because trillion dollar advertising company don't bother, which also happens to be the browser vendor monopoly.

How many man-hour effort does it take to create jxl-rs ?

https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs/graphs/contributors