Safari 16.0 for iOS 16 gains AVIF image format support

Announced following Monday's release of iOS 16 to the public, the development team behind WebKit detailed some of the changes users can see when they use the new Safari 16.0 release on their Apple devices.

Top of the list of changes in Safari 16.0 is support for still images compressed using the AVIF format. Made by the Alliance for Open Media, AVIF is another alternative to standard image formats like JPEG and PNG, which takes advantage of multiple color spaces, lossless and lossy compression, and other features.

The change is initially being introduced in Safari for iOS 16, but will be added to Safari for macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16.1 when they are released in October.

The Safari for iOS 16 release also includes support for Passkeys, a new alternative type of security that provides a similar level of protection as using two-factor authentication or physical tokens.

There is also support for Merchant Tokens in Apple Pay, which helps make recurring payments and multi-merchant payments more efficient. Order Tracking support is also added, so that users can see the status of an order within the Wallet app.

The update also includes Web Inspector Extensions, Container Queries, Subgrid, numerous accessibility improvements, changes to object animations, overscroll behavior, and shared worker support, among other elements.