if you weren't around the web in the mid-to-late-90s it was because Unisys owned some patents on the compression used in GIF files so they were becoming a pain to use thanks to Unisys threating everyone with lawsuits.
Unisys was mainly shaking down CompuServe (who invented GIF, though not the compression used in it) for a license to continue using GIF. but they were threatening anyone who did anything commercial using the format.
another fact about GIF: it has exceptionally stupid (in modern terms) compression. It is really designed for very small limited color pixel arts that change only a little. Which is exactly now how it's being used these days.
which is why a lot of services (imgur, gfycat, twitter itself!) convert them to MP4s or WebMs, which use modern compression techniques like motion compensation
also, despite being a replacement for GIF (which we now mainly think of as an animation format), PNG is explicitly a single-image format. No animation. But there've been two attempts to create PNG-but-animated: MNG in 2001 and APNG in 2008.
MNG was only supported by Mozilla, until it was dropped in 2003 because of lack of use and complexity of implementation (reportedly the MNG decoder was as big as all the other image decoders COMBINED)
and APNG was implemented in 2008 as a sort of simpler PNG-but-with-animation. APNGs have .png extensions and unsupporting image viewers/editors will only see the first frame.
it was explicitly denounced by the PNG committee (because PNG is a single-image format) but it still was implemented by Firefox, which needed a simple animation format for throbbers and the like. It's supported in all non-IE browsers, but isn't very common.
It suffers the same problems as GIF in terms of animation: it uses simple pixel-based compression, not modern video compression techniques (but it doesn't have the color depth limitation, of course)
@xkeepah @TheMorningSongs yeah. PNG didn't like that it was breaking the definition of the spec and that it basically meant everyone implementing PNG either had to upgrade or be seen as "outdated" for not supporting it. Mozilla basically said "fuck it, we're doing it anyway"
@xkeepah @TheMorningSongs there was also briefly a problem of imageboards having people post PNGs that were really APNGs and the moderators not being able to tell (as they weren't running firefox). so people would make APNGs with a 1-delay innocuous first frame, then switch to something else
@xkeepah @TheMorningSongs I ended up contributing code to a couple imageboards to correctly detecting APNGs as such, so they could block or not block them.
Mithgol the Webmaster (@FidonetRunes) 2018-04-07 15:37:51 (UTC)
Настя @Romasheda Ромашкевич: у нас широкие и опасные улицы, а велодорожки повышают безопасность для всех &+IBQ-; давайте сделаем им диету и появится место для велодорожек!