Update 2023-08-27
AVIF images in Edge Canary 118 seem to have been disabled again.
Update 2023-07-17
AVIF images are now showing up in Edge Canary.
Tested on:
- Edge 117.0.1981.0 (Official build) canary (64-bit)
- Windows 10 22H2 (19045.3208)
- http://www.amorosity.com/Slingblade/
Update 2023-02-20 @ 22:23
Alex Russell, Microsoft Partner PM on the Edge team and a Blink API owner has provided an update. It is a licensing issue holding things up.
See here: https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/109899372183448386
Waiting on licensing things to clear up. Unhappy with the delay, but unavoidable.
I’ll leave my original answer below.
The correct answer here is that we simply don’t know as of 2023-02-20. All we have is speculation. I cannot find any official word from Microsoft on it.
-
Microsoft have no official status on AVIF support.
-
Microsoft have not stated anywhere they are working on it.
-
The AV1 Video Extension does not enable AVIF image support in Edge.
-
AV1 Video Decoding is supported.
Suggestions of a flag to enable AVIF support appear to have been hallucinated – they do not work, nor are they documented by Microsoft anywhere.
The closest I can find to an official comment from Microsoft is from XuDong Peng-MSFT in this answer, in which they give this rather cryptic and vague reason:
Unfortunately, currently Microsoft Edge does not support avif format files due to design.
Of course, this makes no sense because other Chromium browsers and Firefox support AVIF just fine on Windows. So we can only speculate as to the reasoning given the silence from Microsoft, and the fully functioning implementations elsewhere. The format is open and royalty-free, so it can’t be a licensing blocker.
Edge remains the only major browser that lacks AVIF support.