We’ve given a lot of thought – whether we should be early adopters of the new image format: AVIF by Netflix. In addition, we are publishing this article to explain the reason for not supporting ALREADY since we are famous for using cutting edge technologies and shiny new specs not yet finalized 🙂
TL;DR; We will be deploying the feature as soon as it reaches sufficient browser support.
The new image format has been recently supported by Google Chrome v85 on 25th of August with the latest browser release.
But before elaborating on that particular subject, let’s go back to the the available image formats and how are they supported by Browser vendors.
As of Today (2020-08-09) we got the following statistics – always based on caniuse.com:
Assuming that IH was to implement AVIF right now, only 0.87% of your total users would be able to get a real size benefit from new image format.
But… would they really? Because you see, that new image version doesn’t really exist in CDN cache as of yet. It would lower your cache-hit ratios which we proudly keep as high as 90% or even bigger in some cases 🙂
Furthermore, if we were to add AVIF support today, it would simply double your monthly spending credits.
In addition we have reason to believe that the overall performance would go down, instead of going up.
As a result, We have decided to support AVIF format as soon as it reaches higher support by users overall so that IMGHaste users will get a real benefit out of it.
P.S. The new AVIF image type is absolutely amazing and we definitely deploying this as soon as our numbers checks out it will benefit our users’ performance.