What is a WOFF2 file?
Web Open Font Format 2.0
- Developed By
- Google, W3C
- Initial Release
- 2018
- MIME Type
- font/woff2
WOFF2 (Web Open Font Format 2.0) is the successor to WOFF 1.0, standardized by the W3C in 2018 to further optimize web typography performance. The primary technical advancement in WOFF2 is the implementation of the Brotli compression algorithm, which offers approximately 30-50% better compression rates than the zlib method used in WOFF 1.0. This format reconstructs the original TrueType or OpenType tables using a transformed and entropy-coded storage format, significantly reducing network payload for high-speed page loads.
How to open a WOFF2 file
As a web-specific resource, WOFF2 files are natively rendered by modern web browsers including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. They are not executable or viewable by standard desktop image or text editors. To utilize the glyphs in a desktop environment or specifically view the file architecture, the file must be decompressed and converted to OTF or TTF using command-line tools like Google's woff2 utilities or specialized font conversion software.