Safari in iOS 16 Finally Supports AVIF Images Coming Soon to macOS and iPadOS

Apple started rolling out iOS 16 to consumers a few hours ago, and while major features include things like redesigned lock screens, improved notifications, and passkeys, there’s another relatively minor feature that might be appreciated by a more tech-savvy audience. Basically, Safari 16.0, released with iOS 16, finally supports AVIF images.

For those who don’t know, AVIF is an image format like JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP. It is developed by the Alliance for Open Media, whose members include Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung, and Tencent.

AVIF offers many features such as lossy and lossless compression and multiple color spaces. The key benefit for end users is that it offers significant savings in bandwidth usage, which should result in better web browsing performance.

While Microsoft Edge doesn’t support AVIF images at all, Chrome has supported it since version 85 for desktop and version 97 for Android. Likewise, Firefox support has also been active in this area since version 93 released last year.

Now Safari 16.0 on iOS 16 also handles AVIF images, with support for macOS Ventura and iPadOS coming next month. Hopefully this latest addition will also push Microsoft to do more in this area.

If you are interested in all the other changes that are present in the latest version of Safari, you can read the detailed changelog here .