// the take
A browser polyfill that lets you use AVIF images before browsers could decode them natively, by repacking the AV1 keyframe data inside the AVIF container into a fake single-frame MP4 and decoding it with the browser's existing AV1 video decoder. It's for anyone who wanted to ship AVIF for its compression win back when native image support (Safari, older Edge/Firefox) wasn't there yet.
The core trick is genuinely clever: instead of shipping a WASM AV1 decoder, it reuses the browser's native video decoding pipeline, which is why it stays under 4kb minified+gzipped. Fetch interception via Service Worker means it works transparently for <img>, CSS background-image, and XHR-loaded images without touching your markup or JS beyond registering the worker.
Last commit is from May 2021 and the project has had no activity since — it's abandoned, with open questions like Safari's eventual AVIF rollout never addressed. More importantly, it's largely obsolete now: Chrome, Firefox, and Safari have all shipped native AVIF decoding since 2020-2023, so the problem this solves mostly doesn't exist anymore for current browser versions. The Service Worker dependency brings real UX friction baked in and never fixed: HTTPS-only, broken in private/incognito windows, and a required page reload on first visit before any AVIF renders. The README's own TODO list (feature detection to skip the polyfill when native support exists, a fallback for browsers without Service Workers, actual benchmarks) was never completed, so you'd be adopting it as a proof-of-concept, not a finished library.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →