> I think what they mean is that other browsers weren't moving to support it (no Safari support, and Firefox support only in nightlies, afaict).

Chrome was the first browser to support WebP and AVIF, they didn't wait for other vendors to implement it. In practice Google is the one who dictates web standards, the others follow them. It's not surprising considering that Blink-based browsers have >70% market share.

>This really doesn't seem that baffling to me. At the very least least, I don't have to speculate very far to make it seem anything other than mundane.

>For example, suppose one engineer took this support on as their pet project, and now they've moved on to other things (pretty typical at Google, from what I understand). Image decoders are complicated, highly optimized code, so they're ripe for security flaws and have to be actively maintained. So you've got a possible attack vector with no maintainer, which nobody is actually using (because it's behind a flag), and no new movement on it becoming a de facto web standard. And of course, the spec is right there (as is the old code), so if that situation changes, you can just put it back and actually dedicate resources to it. That all sounds like business as usual in the software industry.

Right, and none of those considerations apply to WebP and AVIF. In fact, AVIF was enabled by default in production releases immediately, there was no experimental period.

I find their justification baffling. They claim there's "not enough support from the community" despite companies like Adobe, Cloudflare, Facebook, Flickr, Shopify etc. openly endorsing the format. And it's not like there was more hype for AVIF.

"Not sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats" is also surprising: https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_image_codecs