JPEG turned 30 last year. And for most of that time, nothing seriously threatened it. WebP tried in 2010 — Google pushed it hard, everyone kind of shrugged, and JPEG kept going. PNG is still everywhere for anything that needs transparency. GIF somehow refuses to die.
But AVIF is different. It's not another format that browser vendors are grudgingly adding to a compatibility table. The format war is over. AVIF won. That's not hype — it's where the numbers landed.
What even is AVIF
AVIF stands for AV1 Image File Format. The backstory matters here: AV1 was built for video — by a coalition that includes Google, Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, Netflix, and Amazon. These companies were tired of paying royalties on H.264 and HEVC, so they pooled resources and built a royalty-free codec from scratch. It took years. It came out remarkably good.
Then someone noticed: if you take a single frame of an AV1 video and save it as a still image, the compression is absurd. Way better than anything JPEG's algorithm — which dates back to 1992 — can do. That's AVIF. It's AV1 applied to photos.
The numbers
On a typical photo, AVIF achieves roughly 50% better compression than JPG at equivalent visual quality. Not 10%, not 15% — half the file size. For a website that serves a lot of images, that's a meaningful difference in bandwidth costs and load times.
WebP — Google's previous attempt at a modern image format — does better than JPEG too, but AVIF beats WebP by around 30% on most content. If you're already using WebP and thinking "good enough," you're leaving real performance on the table.
Beyond compression, AVIF supports HDR, wide color gamut, and alpha transparency. It handles text and sharp edges better than JPEG at equivalent file sizes. It also supports animation, though for animated content GIF and WebP are still more widely used in practice.
Why 2026 is the year it actually matters
AVIF has existed since around 2019. Chrome got support relatively early. Firefox followed. Safari held out — which matters a lot, because Safari on iPhone is not a niche browser. Safari 16 added support, and by 2024, Can I Use reported 93% global browser coverage. By early 2026 that number crossed 95%.
That's the threshold where a web developer can realistically use a format as their primary option without worrying too much about fallbacks. You still want a JPEG backup for very old devices, but the `<picture>` element makes that easy to set up once and forget.
Google's PageSpeed Insights also started flagging JPEG and PNG images as optimization opportunities and recommending AVIF specifically. If you care about Core Web Vitals — and you should, because they affect rankings — Google is now actively pushing you toward this format.
Where it doesn't work yet
Email is the obvious gap. Most email clients don't render AVIF, and probably won't for a while. If you're generating images for newsletters or automated emails, stay with JPEG or PNG.
Print workflows are similar. Labs and print shops expect TIFF, PDF, or high-quality JPEG. AVIF isn't part of that world yet.
And if you're a photographer managing a library in Lightroom or Capture One, native AVIF export support is still patchy. You can get there through conversion tools, but it's not baked in the way JPEG and TIFF are.
What this means if you run a website
If you're using a CDN like Cloudflare or Cloudinary, you might already be serving AVIF without knowing it. Both services can detect what the browser supports via the Accept header and serve the appropriate format automatically — you upload a JPEG, they handle the rest.
If you're on Next.js, the Image component has served AVIF by default since version 13.
For everyone else: the practical path is to convert your existing images to AVIF and serve them with a JPEG fallback. You can batch convert using FastConvert's image converter — upload your JPEGs or PNGs, get AVIFs back, done.
Should you care if you're not a developer
Probably not in a hands-on way. If you're managing a website through a platform like Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress with a modern theme, the format handling is increasingly abstracted away from you. Your hosting or CDN deals with it.
But if you ever wonder why images on some sites load noticeably faster than on others — with no obvious difference in visual quality — format choice is often a big part of the answer. The gap between a site still serving JPEG at 800KB per image and one serving AVIF at 350KB adds up fast, especially on mobile.
JPEG had a good run. It earned its longevity. But its time as the default is ending, and AVIF is what's replacing it.
