Microsoft has published a new blog post to announce SVG support in Async Clipboard API for Microsoft Edge and other Chromium browsers. In simpler words, this should make it easier to copy-paste SVG files across browsers and applications.
For those unfamiliar with the format, SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. It allows for high-quality images that can scale without losing details while taking as little space as possible. SVG is a great format for the modern web (and other scenarios), but its handling needs some improvements.
While you can copy-paste SVG files from File Explorer to apps, say, PowerPoint, moving one to a web app is challenging, considering that legacy APIs for working with the clipboard do not support SVG. This forced developers and customers to use rather crude methods that would often make things harder. For example, copying raw SVG content using other apps, implementing special parsers, rendering SVG as static images, or creating special UIs for exporting SVG.
Modern Clipboard APIs handle clipboard events much better, and with Edge 124, they fully support SVG, allowing you to copy-paste scalable vector graphics files in more scenarios, such as app-to-web, web-to-web, or web-to-app.
Since Microsoft is one of the largest contributors to the Chromium project and the web overall, it spent time and effort to update the Clipboard API specification. It also contributed its SVG developments to the Chromium project. As a result, better SVG handling will be available in other browsers, such as Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, and more. Microsoft did a similar thing with the improved text rendering earlier this year.
You can see a demo of the new SVG support in Microsoft Edge in the video below. The company also made a test page where you can try those improvements yourself.
More information about SVG support in Microsoft Edge 124 is available here.