The stated reason for Chrome was not ‘we need a memory-safe implementation’. It was ‘there is not enough interest’ and ‘there is not enough improvement over AVI

The stated reason for Chrome was not ‘we need a memory-safe implementation’. It was ‘there is not enough interest’ and ‘there is not enough improvement over AVIF’. At the time, there was interest and there was improvement over AVIF (which Google has decided to support regardless of memory safety, interest, or seemingly any deeper consideration). Memory safety as a condition for adoption was brought up only years later, and by Mozilla rather than Google. The JPEG XL devs, who’d offered to work on it if there was interest, got to work as soon as interest was proclaimed. You might say it’s a good thing for Chrome to have held off adoption until then, but that’s completely incidental, not because they cared. Near-zero efforts to be fair and responsible were made.