WOFF2 Hits 97% Browser Support — Stop Serving WOFF and EOT

WOFF2 Browser Support in 2026

According to caniuse.com data tracked through early 2026, WOFF2 has crossed the 97% global usage threshold. This figure accounts for browsers in active use — not just installs — and is weighted by real-world traffic distribution across regions. The number is even higher in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, where older browser versions have been more thoroughly replaced by auto-updating modern browsers.

The WOFF2 specification was developed by Google engineers and submitted to the W3C, building on the earlier WOFF format by swapping zlib compression for a custom Brotli-based preprocessing pipeline designed specifically for font data. Chrome was naturally the first to ship support, followed by Firefox and eventually Safari — which has historically been slower to adopt newer web standards. Edge gained WOFF2 support when it moved to the Chromium engine. The only meaningful holdout has been IE11, which now accounts for less than 0.3% of global browser usage and has received no security updates since January 2023.

WOFF2 vs. Older Font Formats

The technical case for WOFF2 is not just about browser support — it is about compression quality. WOFF2 was engineered from the ground up for font data, applying a multi-stage pipeline that first preprocesses the raw OpenType tables to improve compressibility, then applies Brotli compression. WOFF, by contrast, uses standard zlib (the same algorithm as gzip), which achieves decent but not exceptional compression on font binary data. EOT uses Microsoft's LZW-derived compression, which predates modern algorithms by decades and produces the worst results of the three formats.

The preprocessing step in WOFF2 is particularly significant. Before compressing, the encoder applies font-specific transformations: it reorders glyph table data to expose repetition patterns, delta-encodes coordinate sequences in TrueType outlines, and reorganizes kerning and layout table data into more compressible structures. This means a WOFF2 file is not simply "the same TTF with Brotli on top" — the internal representation is meaningfully different and significantly more compact than anything Brotli alone could achieve on raw font binary data.

Why Sites Still Serve WOFF and EOT

If the case for WOFF2-only is so clear, why do so many production sites still ship multi-format font bundles? The answer is largely inertia, tooling defaults, and a persistent misconception that keeping fallbacks is "free." None of these reasons hold up under scrutiny.

Migration Checklist: Convert to WOFF2-Only

Migrating to WOFF2-only delivery is a straightforward process that takes an hour or less for most projects. The steps below cover the full migration from audit through verification.

/* BEFORE — legacy multi-format block */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'MyFont';
  src: url('/fonts/myfont.eot');
  src: url('/fonts/myfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
       url('/fonts/myfont.woff2') format('woff2'),
       url('/fonts/myfont.woff') format('woff'),
       url('/fonts/myfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
       url('/fonts/myfont.svg#MyFont') format('svg');
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

/* AFTER — clean WOFF2-only block */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'MyFont';
  src: url('/fonts/myfont.woff2') format('woff2');
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

What to Do Now

The migration steps above are straightforward, and our free tools handle the most time-consuming parts automatically. Here is where to start based on your situation: