APNG Finally Supported Everywhere

2017

Slothilda still working from home. APNG was drafted by Mozilla engineers in 2004 and only achieved universal browser support in 2020, twelve years too late. Place: Apple WebKit · Google Chromium · Mozilla Firefox · Microsoft Edge Figures: Stuart Parmenter, Vladimir Vukićević, Andrew Smith, the Mozilla team that drafted APNG in 2004 · twelve years of W3C politics Animated PNG (APNG) is drafted by Mozilla engineers in 2004 as a patent-free animated-image format. The PNG working group rejects it as an official extension in 2007; it remains a Mozilla-and-Opera private extension for a decade. Safari adds APNG support in 2017 (macOS High Sierra / iOS 11). Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave) add support in 2019-2020 via the Chromium codebase merge. By the end of 2020, APNG works in every browser on earth. The format the PNG team had originally designed in 1996 (see [[png-released-1996]]) as a non-patented GIF alternative finally has the universal-support property that made the GIF unbeatable in the first place.