Firefox 3 and Opera 9.50b support animated PNGs!
If you view this image by Dave Boyle with FireFox 3, Internet Explorer or Opera 9.26, you will se a static PNG file. But if you use the Opera beta, or a beta of the new FireFox 3, you will be able to see an actual PNG animation.
The animated APNG format is supported in many mainstream browsers (except IE of course), though it seems that it will not see wider usage, because of the MNG format, which is supposed to be more popular (based on PNG). The Mozilla Foundation decided to support APNG because of its simple structure.
MNG is also supported in the mainstream browsers, like Konqueror and Netscape. It has been removed from FireFox some time ago, but according to Wikipedia, developers will slowly start to replace GIFs with this format.
The PNG Group decided in April last year not to use APNG generally. They also talk about other alternatives, like ANG, aNIM/mPNG, PNG in GIF and RGBA in GIF.
Format war? Hope not. That would mean more work for the developers. As a hobbyist programmer, I don’t like that idea. But just like PNGs are slowly replacing other still image formats, we could use an alternative to the 256-color bucket of fail which is GIF.
I actually tried to view this page in IE 7 and yeah the picture wasn’t moving at all.
I think GIFs arent all that bad. I remember that I had a problem with a PNG file where it wasn’t really blending well with the other images and I had to use a GIF. Anyways, I may had done something wrong but replacing it with a GIF still solved my problem.
But animated PNGs are really cool!
“The animated APNG format”
That’s a little redundant…