11 ms·

i'm pretty surprised apng hasn't really displaced gif, at least not completely. a lot of people don't seem to even be aware pngs are animatable these days

dspillett 5y ago
Lack of awareness is the main issue by far, but momentum is another. gifs are doing the job and people already have tools they are used to, so there needs to be some compelling reason to switch. For many small animated icons the file-size difference isn't going to be massive and an 8-bit pallet is usually sufficient, and once you start wanting larger animations and full-colour people have already moved to video codecs instead or for non-video-like animations maybe even manipulating SVG. There are no doubt sweet spots where APNG is ideal, or even the only really good option, though I can't think of any that would be common (wanting an animation with an alpha-channel rather than gif's all-or-nothing, maybe). Another matter is compatibility. IE11 is a no-go which even after the recent announcement will kill APNG for some. And while Edge now supports it this has only been the case since the switch to being Chromium based (so the beginning of last year).
mywittyname 5y ago
I think this is because video codecs superseded everything else. An MP4 file is going to be roughly the same size as an apng, while enjoying hardware acceleration on a lot of devices out there. There's still the weird niche of lossless compression where apng or webp would be preferred.
- acdha 5y ago
  20 years ago the case was stronger but video codecs have both soaked up the performance wins and do not expose new security exposure. Based on APNG and JPEG 2000, the only question I have for new formats is how they plan to get browser support. It’s a hard path to relevance unless you have a good answer for that (even if it’s, say, a WASM fallback).
  - asddubs 5y ago
    a wasm fallback for a format is a perverse yet interesting idea. Seems like the main hurdle for new formats (at least patent unencumbered ones) is safari. webp finally made it in, av1, there's a pull request but we'll see what happens
FalconSensei 5y ago
I think they don't work on Slack, Whatsapp and other apps

dspillett 5y ago

Lack of awareness is the main issue by far, but momentum is another. gifs are doing the job and people already have tools they are used to, so there needs to be some compelling reason to switch. For many small animated icons the file-size difference isn't going to be massive and an 8-bit pallet is usually sufficient, and once you start wanting larger animations and full-colour people have already moved to video codecs instead or for non-video-like animations maybe even manipulating SVG. There are no doubt sweet spots where APNG is ideal, or even the only really good option, though I can't think of any that would be common (wanting an animation with an alpha-channel rather than gif's all-or-nothing, maybe). Another matter is compatibility. IE11 is a no-go which even after the recent announcement will kill APNG for some. And while Edge now supports it this has only been the case since the switch to being Chromium based (so the beginning of last year).

mywittyname 5y ago

I think this is because video codecs superseded everything else. An MP4 file is going to be roughly the same size as an apng, while enjoying hardware acceleration on a lot of devices out there. There's still the weird niche of lossless compression where apng or webp would be preferred.

acdha 5y ago
20 years ago the case was stronger but video codecs have both soaked up the performance wins and do not expose new security exposure. Based on APNG and JPEG 2000, the only question I have for new formats is how they plan to get browser support. It’s a hard path to relevance unless you have a good answer for that (even if it’s, say, a WASM fallback).
- asddubs 5y ago
  a wasm fallback for a format is a perverse yet interesting idea. Seems like the main hurdle for new formats (at least patent unencumbered ones) is safari. webp finally made it in, av1, there's a pull request but we'll see what happens

FalconSensei 5y ago

I think they don't work on Slack, Whatsapp and other apps