Microsoft Edge gets WOFF 2.0 support, coming with Windows 10 Anniversary Update

Microsoft added a nice new feature to Edge with Windows 10 Build 14316, which was released several weeks ago to Windows Insiders. Microsoft Edge now supports WOFF 2.0 fonts, which means the website will be able to load font files really quickly in Windows 10. This feature is currently available in Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14316 or newer, meaning that it will be coming to the public with the Anniversary Update, which will bereleased later this July.

As Microsoft states, WOFF 2.0 reduces a size of a font file by more than 30%, which is pretty significant when it comes to page loading times. The company added:

Over 60% of web pages use custom fonts, which make up 5.3% of the size of the average web pagetoday. Modern sites are loading ever more data in the form of fonts, as the demand for custom fonts grows, and as site payloads in general trend upwards. Because of this trend, loading font files faster when rendering a page makes a huge difference in perceived performance; WOFF 2 provides a substantial improvement here.

WOFF 2 compresses fonts with Brotli to deliver more than 30% reduction in font file size over the earlier 2009-era W3C WOFF standard, which used zlib/compress2. WOFF 2 also uses  font-specific compression based on the MicroType Express format that first used in web fonts in the EOT font format.

If you are a web developer, you should be using WOFF 2 on your websites as it is supported by major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and now Edge. However, it is worth noting that you won’t have to change anything if you are using Google Fonts to load fonts on your website as Microsoft Edge will be using WOFF 2 fonts from Google Fonts by default. In addition to this, Microsoft states that the company is working on adding more services, too.