Firefox is finally getting proper AV1 support. Neowin noticed that Mozilla closed a two-year-old bug report asking for this feature, and AV1 hardware decoding is scheduled for Firefox 100 release in May 2022.
Firefox added software decoding for the AV1 codec back in 2019. Software decoding is slow and power hungry, but it’s better than not seeing the video at all. Hardware decoding makes AV1 playback a first class citizen in Firefox, providing faster and more power efficient playback on your GPU (assuming you have the latest hardware). To play AV1 accelerated on a GPU, you need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series card, an AMD Radeon RX 6000 series, or an 11th Gen Intel processor with Iris Xe graphics.
With this kind of corporate support, most video sites are working on AV1 support, although PC and browser playback is probably the slowest area of adoption. YouTube is betting big on AV1, building dedicated video transcoding hardware for data centers and requiring codec support from smart TV licensees like Roku and Android TV. Netflix is actively promoting AV1 and is bringing AV1 content to smart TVs and set-top boxes (but not browsers yet, as far as we can tell). Vimeo added AV1 support in 2019 and Facebook rolled out codec support in 2018.
Since all of these companies want to save money with AV1 through lower bandwidth costs and/or reduced royalties, AV1 will end up everywhere.