Comment by crote

10 hours ago

Removed because having yet another giant C codec was a huge risk, re-added because the PDF Association chose JXL as their next image format so anyone rendering PDFs (including browsers) is now required to have it.

"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.