The W3C WebFonts Working Group[1] has been working on designing and
specifying a new compressed font format for the web, aiming to give
significantly smaller file sizes than the existing WOFF format (to
reduce bandwidth requirements), while remaining cheap to decode (for
low-power devices).
The format is primarily based on earlier TrueType compression work
(MicroType Express) by Monotype, and a new entropy coder (Brotli)
developed by Google's data compression team in Zurich.
For more information about the WOFF2 format, see the FPWD spec[2] and
current Editors' Draft.[3]
WOFF2 is currently supported by Chrome and Opera,[4] and the Google
webfonts service is serving WOFF2-compressed fonts to browser versions
that are known to support it.[5]
I'm proposing to add WOFF2 support to Gecko, based on the "reference
implementation" code from the Google font and compression teams, found
at [6].
Support for WOFF2 will be controlled by a new boolean pref
"gfx.downloadable_fonts.woff2.enabled". Initially this defaults to false
for release builds, and true for nightlies; when we're ready to ship the
feature on-by-default, we can simply flip the pref to true for all channels.
This work is happening in bugs [7] and [8], which I hope to land "real
soon now" (in time for Gecko 35, if all goes well).
- JK
[1] http://www.w3.org/Fonts/WG/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF2/
[3] http://dev.w3.org/webfonts/WOFF2/spec/
[4] http://caniuse.com/#feat=woff2
[5] https://code.google.com/p/font-compression-reference/wiki/testing_woff2
[6] https://code.google.com/p/font-compression-reference/
[7] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1066160
[8] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1064737
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