Laugh is, if the ORIGINAL plan for the successor to 4 Strict had gone through, we MIGHT have been able to use it!
See the ORIGINAL plan? Deprecate <IMG> in favor of <OBJECT>... as it's a pointless redundancy (just as <MENU> was to <UL> or <APPLET> was to... uhm... <OBJECT>). That's actually one of my objections to HTML 5 is the pointlessly idiotically REDUNDANT <AUDIO> and <VIDEO> tags that really should never have been created in the first place, along with them slopping <EMBED> into the specification...
The whole idea was to have file formats NOT be at the mercy of what the browser makers want to create, and to move it into just another plugin so the market could determine which formats they wanted to use. Browser maker wants to add native support, FINE -- hook OBJECT. You want to use a file format the browser maker can't be bothered to, add a extension/plugin to the browser and off you go!
Which is why if you have quicktime installed (windblows or quackintosh) you actually COULD use JPEG2000 in IE in versions 5 through 8! Just like how you could actually use SVG to a varying degree in IE8/earlier if you can track down the old activeX pluging Adobe used to make -- before they kicked SVG to the curb when they bought up Macromedia. It's a historical irony that the two companies most influential in SVG's creation and early implementations dropped it like a hot potato going "screw this" -- only to have browser creators and the W3C pick it up, dust it off, and run with it LONG after its creators stopped giving a **** about it.
Of course all that's in the past now that we have "Formats the browsers natively support or *** off" mentality, creating vendor lock-in for the browser makers in the name of... wait for it... fighting vendor lock-in?!? Flash's stranglehold was so strong that to fight the "vendor lock in" of the format (which it wasn't, the market had simply chosen) they created vendor lock-in with AUDIO and VIDEO. RIGHT...
The big barrier to widespread acceptance though? Nobody made a NSAPI plugin for non Microsoft browsers, Microsoft's implementation of OBJECT required all sorts of convoluted crap (see the dreaded classid garbage), plugins -- like quicktime and flash -- started to get a negative reputation not so much due to their concept, but due to a failure on the part of browser makers to properly sandbox them (something that was ONLY JUST gotten right by Blink)... but most of all?
Patents... and the floss community's wild paranoia about them. The same jokers who got their panties in a wad because Mozilla trademarked Firefox and its logo creating the pointless "Iceweasel"? Yeah, those jokers killed it.
JPEG2000 uses several patented technologies that while the IP holders of said properties said "Go ahead and use them royalty free" very few people trusted it to stay that way. It came into being at about the time your FLOSS-tards were in full on "rah rah, fight the man" mode meaning anything "patented" was instantly verboten.
This was only reinforced by JPEG's own patent issues around 2002, where a company CLAIMED to have a patent on a required technology when they did not, and went full-on patent troll extorting over a hundred million from companies before being kicked firmly in the junk. If ONE company holding a POSSIBLE patent could wreak that much havoc on a file format already established, coded into hundreds if not thousands of programs -- what would be the fallout from trying to adopt a format that relied on technologies held by DOZENS of different IP holders?
The final nail in its coffin though? It wasn't THAT big of an improvement. I mean it's less processing power, better quality by filesize, etc, etc... but it's not SO much better that the masses are clamoring for it. Simple fact is that much like FLAC vs. MP3, 99%+ of the world doesn't know the difference nor do they give a flying purple fish.
Regular JPEG is established, in-place, and for the majority of "normal people" its good enough. JPEG2000 simply isn't enough of an improvement over its predecessor for Joe Sixpack or Susie Sunshine to care. Sometimes "good enough" and "first to market" are all you need to win.