Animated PNG will be available in Firefox 3
Posted by Jon Beattie January 28th, 2008I previously posted about the new features to be supported in Firefox 3 from a session I attended with Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla. One of these was support for APNG or Animated PNG graphics.
This provides an option for animation on a web page beyond Flash or animated GIFs. This is good news for web designers because:
- PNG’s have a full alpha channel
TRANSLATION: They can have a transparent background so you can overlay them on other elements in the page. - PNG’s support a maximum of 16 million colours
TRANSLATION: We can finally have photo quality animated images on a web page. GIF’s only support 256 colour which is too limited for most photos. - PNG’s have better lossless compression
TRANSLATION: The file size is smaller without reducing the quality of the image, which means the image will load faster.
The downside is that this is only going to be supported by Firefox 3, which means having to do a browser detect and deliver an animated GIF to other browser. My understanding though, is that the Animated PNG will just show the first frame if it is not a supported browser, which means you could allow for this in the design and the worse case scenario is the user only gets a static image.
If you are ready to get going you’ll need:
Categories: Development, User Centric Design
First, thanks for the post, I am one of the many PHUG - http://phug.ca(an open source community for designers/developers) members who founded and runs the APNG Open Source Project.
Currently apng’s are supported in FF3 and Opera9.5, plus a few other smaller open source browsers and image viewers are adapting the technology.
I’m interested in seeing if apps like Gimp will support this technology by adding apng anim tools, that would be cool!
On a side note: We are working on some tutorials we hope to have up soon illustrating creative ways to implement apng?’s without over doing it.