Animated PNG Support Is Still Being Blocked From Google's Chrome Browser

[chithanh]

I agree with higuita that APNG hijacking the PNG format is among the reasons why it is bad and should be rejected. It was an ill-conceived format, designed for the wrong reasons.
Thankfully, with Mozilla rapidly losing relevance, they can no longer afford trying to impose their NIH formats on the web.

[schmidtbag]

I wasn't even aware APNG was a thing. Seems pretty stupid to me, particularly if the file extension is ".png". Just because you can animate something, that doesn't mean it should be animated. There are better alternatives to gif and have been for a while.

[cl333r]

I wasn't even aware APNG was a thing. Seems pretty stupid to me, particularly if the file extension is ".png". Just because you can animate something, that doesn't mean it should be animated. There are better alternatives to gif and have been for a while.

Yeah, an animated image sometimes doesn't have an (obvious) way to stop the animation so the browser keeps re-rendering and wasting CPU power and heat for no reason.

[carewolf]

I agree with higuita that APNG hijacking the PNG format is among the reasons why it is bad and should be rejected. It was an ill-conceived format, designed for the wrong reasons.
Thankfully, with Mozilla rapidly losing relevance, they can no longer afford trying to impose their NIH formats on the web.

It is a pretty elegant format. The nice thing about it that it naturaly falls back to being a PNG, and being so simple means it doesn't have the problem with bugs and security holes which MNG had (which were basically overdesigned).

[chithanh]

carewolf
Surely APNG would have been an elegant format on its own. The fallback to being a PNG is what Mozilla wanted but they got laughed out of the PNG group with their proposal to abuse the PNG standard as higuita wrote.

MNG has its own set of problems, the complexity can however be controlled with profiles such as MNG-LC or MNG-VLC.

[maxst]

i always hated animated gif, it was a stupid hack without any easy way to know if the gif is animated or not if the current viewer do not support the animated extension...

Well, nobody uses GIF for static images these days, so 'animated' would be a pretty good guess. And I wonder why nobody has same problem with WebP? It's the same 'hack' - started as a static format and later extended to include animation, both sharing the same extension. But it's google, so no objections, right?

APNG it was even worst, it was a hijack of the png format (as the extension was denied why the PNG group),

According to PNG specs, third-party extensions are allowed. That's why libpng will never be able to reject APNG files as 'incorrect'.

[chithanh]

And I wonder why nobody has same problem with WebP? It's the same 'hack' - started as a static format and later extended to include animation, both sharing the same extension. But it's google, so no objections, right?

There is actually literal truth to this. Google are the keeper of the WebP standard (as with VP8 and VP9) so they decide over the future development of that standard.

If Mozilla had actually introduced their own standard and not tried to hijack PNG for their format it might have come to a different result.

That's why libpng will never be able to reject APNG files as 'incorrect'.

That is correct but besides the point.

[zanny]

The debate is pointless, sites like Imgur and Gfycat are already re-encoding gifs to mp4s, the "animated image format" is already won by actual moving pictures.

[maxst]

Actually the results for Mozilla are pretty good so far.
Recently Apple added APNG support in Safari, then my APNG patch for WebKit was accepted, and I believe that Chromium will accept my code too. Eventually.
They are already negotiating with Mozilla:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.platform

[maxst]

The debate is pointless, sites like Imgur and Gfycat are already re-encoding gifs to mp4s, the "animated image format" is already won by actual moving pictures.

And yet, I see animated GIF on Google's front page right now, celebrating leap year. Just like every image shouldn't be a JPEG, not every animation should be a webm/mp4. There are some use cases when you really don't want artifacts.