I think it's fine to assume the more likely interpretation that this company simply isn't interested in the format anymore, rather than whatever larger stretch you're describing here. "You don't want to keep dead code around." That's rich :) maybe if this was some one person hobby project or something.
I strongly disagree with "more likely interpretation". For several reasons:
- FireFox & Safari also don't fully support it. For your claim to be true, Google would need to be in control of them, too.
- I still get nag emails that I'm long overdue to remove dead test code from my Chromium tests. I'm being a bad person to other Chromium devs by being lazy and not getting around to it.
I think it is far more likely that they ran a test and know they're ready to support JPEG XL when the time comes. And that time (IMHO) is when there is already wide spread support outside of browsers. Browsers should be the last ones to add it. Not the first.
Chrome supports plenty of things that are unsupported by Firefox and Safari. E.g. you get set the audio sink id on individual media elements in Chrome. You can’t do that in Safari and Firefox.
Cleaning up code is something I get great pleasure. It not only makes navigating the code base easier for people new to the code base won't look at something that isn't ever actually run in production. It also prevents people from depending on something that we don't really want to be used anymore.
