Firefox version 67 includes support for a new high performance AV1 video decoder

The latest version of Mozilla's flagship Firefox web browser has implemented an open source video decoder for all of its desktop versions (all supported operating systems in both 32-bit and 64-bit).

In a post on Mozilla's Hacks blog, Nathan Egge and Christopher Montgomery introduced the video decoder, dav1d, alongside various points about what it does better than other popular video decoders:

• Decoded files are more than 30% smaller than today’s most popular web codec VP9 • Files are 50% smaller than its widely deployed predecessor H.264

Sponsored by the Alliance for Open Media, dav1d is the result of a partnership between VideoLAN (creator of VLC Media Player) and the FFmpeg community. Various experts did not expect anyone in the web browser market to incorporate dav1d until 2020 at the earliest. Mozilla Firefox's implementation flies in the face of these adoption predictions.

Egge and Montgomery conclude the post by stating that Mozilla is investing resources "to improve encoder speed, optimizing new techniques that appear for the first time in AV1."