AVIF Image Format Offers 20% Savings Compared to WebP
https://twitter.comAV1 (.avif) is an image file format that Netflix is considered superior to the JPEG, PNG, and even the WebP image formats for its image quality to compressed file size ratio. The format was developed by the Alliance for Open Media in collaboration with Google, Cisco, and Xiph.org (who worked with Mozilla, creators of the Firefox browser). This format was created to be an open-sourced and royalty-free image format.
Currently, the support is very limited but it is supposed to land in Chrome 85 and Firefox 80 on August 25, 2020. That said, we can still use the format in native HTML with the <picture>
element. The <picture>
element allows for progressive support as we can list the image sources in the order in which we want loaded, and the browser will load the first that it supports. If browser doesn’t support <picture>
at all, it will fallback to using the default <img>
, so it can work from an SEO point of view.
I wouldn’t rush to implement it but when one of the image optimization plugins offer to enable it with a checkbox I will probably enable it.