The original libjxl was written in C and has been riddled with security issues. It’s been rewritten in Rust which is what has been shipped by Chrome and soon Firefox.

I have to think this is a substantial reason for the backflip here as adding a new huge C library to browsers is a huge concern.

Hurrah!

> Big companies have big egos

More likely the Google eng. director who tried to get rid of it because of not-invented-here syndrome (it was built in a different org) got a new job or changed company.