The WebKit browser used by Apple’s web browser Safari has released a noteworthy technology preview update: the experimental WebCodecs AV1, dav1d codecs have been added, and a new version of the WebKit engine has been adopted by Apple’s Safari Technology 161 Preview release.

WebKit It is an open source web browser engine, which is used in Apple’s Safari browser, and its branch Blink isDepend on Google open sourceThe browser rendering engine, Blink is part of the Chromium browser core.

Safari Technology Preview 161 adds experimental WebCodecs AV1 support to WebKit, whose encoding software support relies on libaom. This update also changes WebKit’s default AV1 decoder, which now uses the VLC-developed dav1d decoder instead of AOMedia’s libaom decoder. Apple developers note in the changes to dav1d:

The dav1d decoder is more efficient than the libaom decoder, so it is better to use dav1d. dav1d is a library linked in WebCore, so we created a dav1d webrtc decoder in WebCore, not libwebrtc, and integrated this decoder at WebKit level.

In addition to the experimental WebCodecs AV1 support and dav1d decoder, this WebKit update adds experimental support for the AudioSession WebAPI, various rendering fixes, support for WebAssembly GC packed array types, enabling unprefixed versions of the fullscreen API, support for ” Source Model and Source Type properties support, WebGL fixes, and various other changes. Details can be found on the Apple blog.