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

While Firefox, WebKit, and other browsers / layout engines have supported APNG (Animated PNGs) for some time in hopes of finally unseating GIFs for being a modern animated image file format, it doesn't look like that will happen with Google's Chrome/Chromium being among the few still resisting support for that file format.

Chrome/Chromium and Microsoft's IE/Edge are the only notable browsers not shipping Animated PNG support with Firefox having supported it for the better part of a decade, WebKit has for one year, and a number of the other smaller engines/browsers also support APNG.

A Phoronix reader who has also been heavily involved in the charge of trying to get APNG support inside Chrome/Chromium wrote this weekend to share that it remains looking like it's not going to happen. Him and others are believing that Google developers aren't willing to support APNG as they would rather put their weight behind animated WebP support, Google's own web imaging format. Google has proposed WebP for animated images as better technology than GIF with allowing many more colors, combining frames with lossy and lossless compression, and other features.

It's a lengthy thread, but if you want to read more about the arguing that's been going on for months over APNG support for Chrome/Chromium, see this thread. It doesn't come down to just users wanting this feature and not doing anything about it, but patches have been written by independent developers except there is no timeline or apparent willingness for mainlining the support.