Me when I will meet the creator of webp:
Conversation
its so fuckign annoying developers have had 12 years to support it but STILL DON'T
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animated png has been around 15 years, it's well supported in browsers but I'm not sure I've ever seen an .apng in the wild.
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APNG doesn't have much of a use case. It's ridiculously inefficient compared to using a video for almost any use case. PNG isn't an efficient lossless image format and has aged really badly, especially compared to JPEG which held up really well for lossy photograph compression.
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and yet here we are still using .gifs, which are a billion times worse
the appeal of it isnt to encode video. its to encode images with a bit of animation.
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Nearly everything people refer to as a GIF is a video made to act like a traditional animated GIF. PNG itself is only passable at compressing pixel art with few colors. Most efficient way to use PNG with modern browsers is with compression disabled: thejh.net/written-stuff/.
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GIF is very much alive in a sad existence: it's the most efficient 1x1 transparent tracking pixel. nginx even has a dedicated module to produce them:
nginx.org/en/docs/http/n
They're still used as super low quality, inefficient videos but it's almost always just an actual video.
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APNG is genuinely not useful. It's better to use CSS / JavaScript animations, SVG or videos.
Even if there were common use cases for stringing together raster image frames without compression across them, PNG is far from being an efficient lossless encoding format for 1 image.
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APNG exists because Mozilla created it as a convenient hack for internal use in Gecko to replace GIF animations with a format supporting transparency.
Drawing each frame of an animation with pixel art shipped as a GIF is almost as dated as using blink/marquee tags at this point.