WOFF2 (Web Open Font Format 2)
WOFF2 is the latest web font format, using Brotli compression to achieve 30% better compression than WOFF1. It is the recommended format for web fonts, supported by all modern browsers, and is what Google Fonts serves by default.
MIME Type
font/woff2
Type
Binary
Compression
Lossless
Advantages
- + Best compression for web fonts — 30% smaller than WOFF1
- + Supported by all modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge)
- + Default format served by Google Fonts
- + Fast decompression in browsers
Disadvantages
- − Not supported by IE11 (use WOFF1 fallback)
- − Not suitable for desktop font installation
- − Requires tools like pyftsubset or woff2_compress for creation
When to Use .WOFF2
Use WOFF2 as the primary web font format; include WOFF1 as a fallback only for IE11 and very old browsers.
Technical Details
WOFF2 applies font-specific pre-processing (glyph outline, hmtx, loca transforms) before Brotli compression. This produces significantly smaller files than generic compression of the raw font tables.
History
The W3C published WOFF2 as a recommendation in 2018. It uses Google's Brotli compression algorithm, which was specifically enhanced for font data with pre-processing transforms.