Re: Intent to Ship: AV1 Still Image File Format (AVIF)

[Jon Bauman]

After deciding not to ship AVIF previously due to colorspace support issues, we are currently planning to ship in Fx92.

On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 2:50 PM Jon Bauman <jba...@mozilla.com> wrote:

As of March 18, 2021, I intend to turn AVIF on by default all platforms in Firefox 88. It has been developed behind the image.avif.enabled preference. Though there's a good chance it'll be delayed until Firefox 89, depending on some external factors.

AVIF is an image format based on the AV1 video codec from the Alliance for Open Media. AV1 support shipped in release 55 and is currently supported in Chrome, but not Safari. The Chromium issue for AVIF support is 960620. Chrome shipped AVIF support in version 85 in August 2020. Among other chromium-based browsers, Opera shipped in version 71 in September, 2020 and Egde has yet to ship AVIF support. Safari has not shipped AVIF support yet and has released no plans, but Apple is an active member of AOM and initial AVIF support recently landed in Webkit. However, Safari is unlikely to ship AVIF support until it appears in macOS. More details on support in other browsers are available at https://caniuse.com/avif.

Bug to turn on by default: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682995.

We are choosing to ship AVIF as an MVP with some features not yet implemented, notably animations/image-sequences, grid-based image support, image transforms (e.g., rotation, mirroring, etc.) and 10- and 12-bit image support. Full details of what we intend to complete and leave incomplete before shipping with AVIF enabled by default can be seen in the dependency tree for the AVIF meta bug.

This feature was previously discussed in this "Intent to implement" thread.