Firefox 77 Nightly Adds Initial AV1 Image File Support (AVIF)

Exciting times in Mozilla land as in addition to the recent Wayland improvements along with Flatpak availability and WebGPU support coming together, the newest Firefox Nightly builds now have AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) support.

AVIF is the image format based on the AV1 coding scheme and using the HEIF file format (High Efficiency Image File Format). AVIF is capable of both lossy and lossless compression, HDR, animated image sequences, and other features. AVIF 1.0 was finalized last year and since then has received considerable interest from the likes of Netflix for being superior than JPEG.

Mozilla has experimental AVIF support now merged into the newest Firefox 77 Nightly builds as of this weekend. There still are some known bugs and shortcomings in its implementation, but the initial support is there. More details within this Mozilla.org bug report.