What is AVIF?

If you are reading tech news this day, you probably heard about the AV1 video coding format. AV1 will reduce file sizes without losing quality. It's the next big coding format that big tech giants start supporting in their hardware and software. AVIF is AV1 Image File Format. It uses AV1 to reduce image file sizes. AVIF and AV1 were built by the Alliance for Open Media, a non-profit industry consortium that develops open, royalty-free technology for multimedia delivery.

Why should you use AVIF?

AVIF is excellent at reducing image file sizes without losing quality. There are many comparisons, but I like this post from ctrl.blog. According to this post

AVIF outperformed both JPEG and WebP for every image in the test. AVIF's 85th percentile was the same as WebP's 15th percentile! A median saving of -50 % at the same DSSIM is a very good result!

But why should we use AVIF now?

If you heard about AVIF before, you probably know about its benefits compared to the WEBP. You can find great in-depth articles about the format and the technical details of how AVIF and AV1 work.

But you should consider using AVIF now because, unlike WEBP, AVIF will be the next modern image format for the web.

AVIF was released in 2019, and only four years later, almost every modern browser supports it (resource). while WEBP adoption was much slower; for example, Firefox added webp support nine years after the initial release, and Safari added support after ten years.

As I mentioned above, AVIF was developed by AOM, a non-profit industry consortium that Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix founded. And right now, it has over 43 members.

All this shows that, unlike WEBP, the AVIF adoption will be much faster. And you can start adopting the AVIF format in your sites to increase performance and reduce bandwidth usage.