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Chrome 155 Beta Adds Rust-Based JPEG XL Decoding, Post-Quantum WebCrypto Algorithms and Text Module Imports

Chrome 155 entered beta on September 16, 2026 with JPEG XL decoding via a Rust decoder, NIST post-quantum algorithms in WebCrypto, and TC39 text module imports.

Software Development Frameworks
chrome jpeg-xl webcrypto post-quantum-cryptography web-standards
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Overview

Chrome 155 is in beta as of September 16, 2026, according to the Chrome for Developers beta announcement. The release bundles image-format, cryptography and JavaScript module changes alongside a set of CSS and web API additions.

What We Know

JPEG XL decoding

The beta adds support for decoding JPEG XL (image/jxl) images in Blink using jxl-rs, which Chrome describes as a memory-safe pure Rust decoder. The same post lists progressive decoding, wide color gamut, HDR, high bit depth and animation among the format’s capabilities, and references ISO/IEC 18181.

The jxl-rs project describes itself on GitHub as “a high-performance, conforming, and memory-safe JPEG XL decoder written in Rust.” Its README says it is the JPEG XL decoder implementation used in Google Chrome / Chromium and Mozilla Firefox.

Post-quantum algorithms in WebCrypto

According to the Chrome 155 beta post, the Web Cryptography API gains support for multiple post-quantum cryptographic algorithms standardized by NIST. The listed additions are ML-KEM (768 and 1024), ML-DSA (44, 65 and 87), ChaCha20-Poly1305 and X-Wing.

JavaScript module changes

The Chrome 155 beta post says the release implements Import Text, a TC39 proposal that adds import ... with { type: "text" } statements, which load text data as a string value.

A second module change addresses failed loads. The same post states that web developers currently cannot retry failed module loads because those failures are cached. With the change, developers can retry manually, for example by calling import() again on an unstable network.

Other additions

The beta announcement also lists:

  • Digital Credentials API issuance support, which lets issuing websites such as a university, government agency or bank initiate provisioning of digital credentials into a user’s mobile wallet application.
  • A media-playback-while-not-visible permission policy, which lets embedders control whether hidden iframes can play audible media.
  • CSS additions including symbols(), margin-trim, text-decoration-skip-spaces and corner shorthand properties.
  • Window controls for applications with the window-management permission, including maximize(), minimize(), restore() and setResizable().
  • New canvas color spaces, srgb-linear and display-p3-linear.

What We Don’t Know

The beta post, as read for this article, does not give a stable release date for Chrome 155. Beta features can change or be pulled before a stable release, and the post does not say how other browsers plan to handle the post-quantum WebCrypto algorithms or text module imports.