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Comment by maxst | Hacker News Reader

This doodle as GIF: 97 864 bytes Converted into APNG: 77 472 bytes

Browser share that supports APNG: ~25%

Browser share that supports GIF: ~99.9%

Google is not just posting doodles on the front page. Last time I heard they also have a browser. So they can shift those percentages, and by helping APNG, they can help themselves: their front-page will load faster. It's a win-win.

Chrome probably should support APNG. But I'm not sure it would be wise to use APNG even if Chrome did support it.

This site doesn't seem to have any problems serving better-looking APNGs for Firefox users, and plain old GIFs to all others: http://www.rw-designer.com/cursor-set/icq-flower

Google's browser already supports WebM, which should compress better than GIF even in lossless mode.

Can you convert this doodle GIF into lossless WebM? It would be interesting to see the numbers. I assume lossy compression would look bad, probably not worth it.

Lossy wouldn't look bad, it's just not a direct comparison :) Here are 3 files: a lossless WebP and two lossy ones with max and min quality settings https://www.dropbox.com/sh/q1jqoru5ljtq9on/P2ELh8NkA6?lst The lossless one is slightly bigger than the GIF which I did not expect. The high-quality lossy one is obviously overkill and is huge! The low-quality lossy one is smaller but looks like crap.

  GIF:     81 kB
  WebP:    82 kB
  -q 0:    59 kB
  -q 100: 259 kB

Yeah, that's what I would expect from WebP, as I played with gif2webp before, but I thought you said WebM, as in proper video?

Well... I don't know how to make a lossless WebM video. And according to the bottom of this page https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/faq it would probably be bigger anyway.

Really? That's it? Like a 20% reduction in filesize? Considering how archaic the GIF format is, I'm actually really disappointed.

No wonder nobody supports APNG - the only real benefit is animated alpha-blending.

Yeah it's old, but it's still one of LZ types. ZIP is archaic too, but you can only improve it so much, even with very modern methods.

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