Google reversed a three year old decision and shipped a new image decoder. The format that actually sits on billions of phones remains locked out of every major browser except Safari, and the reason has nothing to do with engineering.
In February, Google did something it had spent three years insisting it would never do. It put a JPEG XL decoder back into Chrome. Version 145 shipped with a fresh implementation of the format, written in Rust and tucked behind an experimental flag, after a public campaign led not by Google but by outside engineers who refused to let the issue die. It was a rare reversal for a company that usually decides which web technologies live and die, and it says a great deal about how image formats win or lose.
It also throws an awkward spotlight on a format that has not won, at least not outside Apple’s walls. Every iPhone sold since 2017 saves photos as HEIC by default. That is billions of images, with a fresh wave arriving this month as the iPhone 18 Pro reaches buyers. And nine years on, the most popular browser on earth still cannot display a single one of them. Neither can Firefox. Neither can Edge. Drag a photo straight from a new iPhone into a Chrome tab and you get a download prompt, not a picture.
The reason is not technical. It is legal, and it is about money.
What Chrome actually did
The JPEG XL saga is worth a short recap, because it explains the HEIC problem by contrast. JPEG XL is a royalty free format finalised in 2022. It compresses better than WebP, handles both lossy and lossless work, and has a party trick that no other modern format offers: it can shrink an existing JPEG by roughly a fifth with no loss at all, and turn it back into the exact original bytes on demand. Chrome supported it experimentally for about a year, then removed it in October 2022, citing a lack of ecosystem interest.
The ecosystem disagreed, loudly and for a long time. Apple added JPEG XL support to Safari in 2023. Photographers, CDN vendors and the open source community kept the pressure on. In January this year a Rust based decoder was merged into Chromium, with the work led by Helmut Januschka, head of engineering at the Austrian media group Krone Multimedia, rather than by anyone at Google. Chrome 145 followed on 10 February. As of this summer the decoder is still off by default, and nobody outside Google will commit to a date for flipping it on, but the direction is clear. JPEG XL got back into Chrome because it cost Google nothing but engineering time and goodwill to let it in.
HEIC has never been able to say that.
HEIC is a different animal
HEIC is a container from the MPEG standards body wrapped around images compressed with HEVC, the video codec also known as H.265. Apple adopted it in iOS 11 because the numbers were compelling: roughly half the file size of a JPEG at the same visible quality, support for 16 bit colour, and the ability to store bursts, Live Photos and depth maps inside a single file. Apple’s own chips have had hardware HEVC encoders and decoders for years, so the phone pays no battery penalty for the smarter format. Android followed with platform level support in Android 10, and Samsung and Google phones can shoot HEIC too, though neither makes it the default.
The catch is the codec inside. HEVC is covered by thousands of patents, and unlike its predecessor H.264, there is no single licensing body to deal with. There are at least three separate pools, Access Advance, Via LA and Velos Media, plus a number of companies that license their patents individually. Anyone who ships a software HEVC decoder to hundreds of millions of users is, in theory, on the hook to all of them. The fragmentation was so damaging that in 2015 Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Cisco and Intel formed the Alliance for Open Media specifically to build a royalty free alternative. That effort produced the AV1 video codec and its still image cousin AVIF. Apple joined the alliance in 2018, and Safari has supported AVIF since 2022.
Browser makers therefore drew a line. Chrome will play an HEVC video if your hardware already contains a licensed decoder, a concession it made in late 2022, but it has never extended that courtesy to still images, and it ships no software HEVC decoder of its own. Firefox takes the same position. Microsoft went a step further and made the cost visible: Windows can open HEIC files, but only after you buy the HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store for 99 cents. Somebody has to pay the pools, and Microsoft decided it would be you.
The result is a format that is technically superior, ubiquitous on the capture side, and quietly broken almost everywhere else. Google Photos accepts HEIC uploads without complaint. Google Chrome, sitting on the same computer, cannot render the same file.
Where the damage lands
None of this matters to someone who takes a photo on an iPhone and shares it with another iPhone. Apple’s ecosystem converts silently in the background, and most people never see the .heic extension at all. The problem surfaces the moment a photo leaves that ecosystem, and it surfaces in the least glamorous places.
Estate agents uploading listing photos to systems built a decade ago. Insurance claimants dragging damage photos into a claims portal that expects JPEG. Sellers on marketplaces whose upload forms reject the file or produce a broken thumbnail. HR teams receiving identity documents by email that open as a grey icon on a Windows laptop. Web developers whose upload widgets validate the file type in the browser and, because the browser has never heard of HEIC, throw an error before the file even reaches the server. Talk to anyone who runs a customer support desk for a product that accepts image uploads and they will tell you that “my photo will not upload” tickets are disproportionately iPhone tickets.
The fixes are well known, and none of them is elegant. The nuclear option is to change the camera setting. Under Settings, Camera and then Formats, choosing Most Compatible makes the iPhone shoot JPEG from that point on, at the cost of files roughly twice the size and the loss of some newer camera features. That does nothing for the photos already on the phone or already sent, which is where most of the pain lives. On a Mac, Preview will export a HEIC to JPEG one file at a time. On Windows, you pay the 99 cents or install a third party viewer. For a batch of files, a browser based tool is usually the quickest route. Services such as heicjpg.online, which lets you convert HEIC to JPG online without creating an account, take a handful of files per run, return a ZIP, and keep the EXIF data, resolution and orientation intact, which matters if the photos are evidence for a claim or a listing. One thing worth knowing about that category of tool: the conversion happens on the service’s server, not inside your browser, so the files do leave your machine. This particular one states that uploads are deleted after 30 days, which is a reasonable policy, but it is a consideration if the images are sensitive.
That an entire cottage industry of converters exists at all is the real story here. It is the tax a fragmented licensing regime levies on ordinary users, one photo at a time.
The twist: Apple is closer to JPEG XL than Google is
Here is where the two threads meet. Apple, which is itself a licensor in the HEVC patent pools and which built its entire photo pipeline around the codec, has already hedged its bets. Safari has rendered JPEG XL since 2023. Since the iPhone 16 Pro, the camera has been able to save ProRAW captures as JPEG XL, in either lossy or lossless form, and the option is still there on the 18 Pro. In other words, the company that made HEIC the default format for a billion people now ships a phone that can shoot the very format Google just readmitted to Chrome, and its own browser has supported that format for three years longer than Google’s.
Nobody at Apple has suggested that HEIC is going anywhere. The hardware investment is enormous, the installed base of photos is measured in the trillions, and for anything that stays inside the Apple ecosystem the format works beautifully. But the direction of travel is visible. If Chrome flips its JPEG XL flag to on by default, and Firefox follows, the web will for the first time have a modern, royalty free, high quality photo format supported by every major browser and natively produced by the world’s most popular camera. At that point a future iOS could offer JPEG XL as a default capture format without breaking the web, something HEIC has never been able to do.
That is a big if, and a long timeline. In the meantime, the lesson of the past nine years is a simple one. Formats do not win on the web because they are better. JPEG XL is back in Chrome because nobody has to pay anyone to decode it. HEIC is still locked out because someone does. Until that changes, the conversion step is not going away, and every new iPhone that ships makes it a little more necessary.
