Re:PNG Is Back
by jokoon on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @04:08AM
(#44374786)
both GIF and PNG use zipping for compressing data, so APNG are not much better than GIF
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PNG uses deflate (same as zip) but GIF uses LZW. These are different algorithms. You should expect different compression results i would assume.
ZIP is theoretically a generic container and theoretically supports a number of different compression formats. Stored (no compression) and deflate are the only ones you can count on being supported everywhere though so in practice you're not wrong.
Remember when we unwillingly trained the generative AI:s of our time with an endless torrent of factoids?
(A)PNG supports semi-transparency. In GIF a pixel is either full transparent or full opaque.
Also while true color gifs seem to be possible it is usually limited to 256 colors per image.
For those reasons alone APNG is much better than GIF.
> Also while true color gifs seem to be possible it is usually limited to 256 colors per image.
No, it's limited to 256 colors per frame and frames can have duration 0 which allows you to combine multiple frames into more than 256 color images.