Mozilla Firefox Appears Ready To Enable AVIF Image Handling Support By Default

It looks like Mozilla Firefox very soon will be enabling support for AVIF as the image format based on AV1 video coding.

Google added support for AVIF to Chrome/Chromium earlier this year and shipped with Chrome 85. There has been other industry adoption as well around AVIF images, even by the likes of Microsoft with Windows. Now in an upcoming Firefox release, AVIF image support will be present too.

There is this Mozilla bug ticket tracking the enablement of AVIF support by default. The patch enabling the support by default (rather than being hidden behind a config flag) was initially pushed but then reverted due to broken test cases.

Those items have been looked at and AVIF appears to be ready now for re-landing. But as one of the Mozilla lead on this effort, Jon Bauman, doesn't want to push the change prior to going on holiday, it looks like the enabling by default of AVIF support will wait until after Christmas.

In any case, it's looking like Firefox in early 2021 will be supporting AVIF images out of the box. This comes after earlier in 2020 they added it as an experimental option but has now proven itself stable and reliable.

For those looking at converting images to AVIF, there are avifenc benchmark results using that reference encoder on OpenBenchmarking.org.