Google Chrome 59 will offer full support for animated PNGs

GIFs are a fun way to express your emotions over the internet. While they have been in existence for a long time now, they have become really popular in the recent times. However, there is one catch, the GIF format has some problems such as huge images, restrictions on color, bitrate and frames per second.

Although writing an actual format for replacing the GIF is not so difficult, making it able to function universally is a quite a task. Anyway, animated PNGs or aPNGs just took a significant step towards universal acceptance, and the courtesy goes to the latest release of Chrome. The upcoming 59 version of Chrome will offer full support for animated PNGs, as per developer comments, which was spotted by 9to5Google.

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While APNGs have had hacked-together support for quite some time now through Chrome extensions, full support is indeed a big news, especially for web developers. They can now include aPNGs in a webpage knowing that most of the viewers will be able to see them.

However, Chrome is not the first browser to provide full support aPNGs. Firefox supports them as well. Apple added aPNGs for iOS 10's animated iMessage features while Safari supports them on MacOS and iOS.

So now the default android browser and Microsoft's Edge are the only browsers that do not offer near-universal support for aPNGs.

Google Chrome 58 version started rolling out to android devices and PCs running Mac, Windows, and Linux from the previous week. It fixed a lot of security issues and added some much-awaited features.

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