The Next Generation of Image Compression.
August 11, 2020
written by
Joren Mathews
As you know, 3FO dedicates time reviewing various new technologies and techniques that improve our work. It’s one of the many, many advantages to having an old experienced team at your back. Last time we discussed Progressive Web Apps and how they will revolutionize websites. This time, thanks to collaboration between the Alliance For Open Media, Google, Cisco and Xiph.org, we’re sharing with you that a new highly efficient image format is on the horizon.
AV1 (.avif) will be added Chrome 85 and Firefox 80 at the end of August 2020. It is 50% smaller than .jpeg, which is a 20% improvement over .webp, the old next-gen image format. So not only is it smaller than .jpeg, but it also supports transparency and HDR color support.
We at 300FeetOut are very excited by the performance improvement opportunities about to be unlocked, and our sites are already built to implement .avif with no additional effort on our clients part, and with fallbacks so that all older browsers continue functioning seamlessly. Because everyone knows someone who still runs IE6 (really hope that we’re kidding when we say that).