While video-hosting service Vimeo isn"t quite as popular as YouTube, it still has hundreds of millions of users. Over the past few years, the company has been regularly updating its service to entice more customers.
The firm has announced that it now supports AVIF images which means an automatic improvement in page load times and bandwidth consumption too.
For those unaware, AVIF is an acronym for "AV1 Image File Format" and is essentially an AV1 format for still images. Both these specifications have been getting a lot of traction recently. AVIF is getting official support in Android 12 and has been supported in Cloudflare since October 2020 as well.
Vimeo has stated that with support for AVIF images, page load times will increase as the format preserves comparable image quality to JPEG and WebP, while maintaining a smaller file size. Although a potential downside is that encoding takes longer, the firm says that this will not be an issue because this will be a one-time operation after which AVIF images will be cached.
Moving forward, Vimeo says that its image server will deliver image formats depending upon the HTTP headers of a web request and the properties of the source image. All browsers that explicitly support the AVIF format will automatically receive images in the format, while browsers which don"t will receive WebP images. JPEG and PNG will only be kept as fallback options and for compatibility with those on outdated configurations.
Vimeo has highlighted that if you use Firefox and have AVIF enabled manually, you should keep in mind that colors will not appear accurate because the browser lacks proper color space support.