[pornel]

I wish AVIF had a simpler web-oriented profile. It has inherited bloat from HEIF, which is built on a tower of specs, which were designed to be a catch-all of all features for everyone, including cameras, photo management, and editing. Because it recycles a video codec and old MP4 specs, there's also a ton of compatibility with legacy video tools — in a brand new image format.

AVIF/HEIF has hundreds of features that decoders are theoretically supposed to implement. Many of ISOBMFF "boxes" also have multiple versions (typically 16/32/64-bit versions or "oops we forgot to add a field" version). Does every decoder really need to support all of them? It's such a waste of effort, and file bloat. Browsers only care about getting pixels on screen. They don't have UIs nor APIs to browse through photo bursts, bracketed exposures, or an infrared channel (or is every AVIF viewer supposed to implement these now?)

And some features are even dangerous: lossless cropping. Great for your camera roll app, but for publishing on the Web it's a huge footgun. You could think you've cropped private info out of the picture you've shared, but randos on the internet can uncrop your HEIF pictures.