Safari for iOS 8 supports the playback of animated PNGs

Safari for iOS 8 has made a more important qualitative leap than we perceived a priori. A few days ago we told you that the browser included by default in iOS added support for WebGL, a technology that opens a new world of possibilities for web-based games, even being able to run technical demonstrations of Quake 3 or Doom 3 from Safari for iPhone or iPad, something unthinkable a few years ago.

Another new in Safari for iOS 8 that perhaps does not surprise us as much as the previous one is the support to reproduce animated PNGs, an alternative to the well-known GIFs but that offer the advantage of offering a greater variety of colors and the possibility of working with transparencies, one of the characteristics that often makes us opt for the PNG format instead of the usual JPEG.

While GIFs support a maximum of 256 colors per frame, GIFs Animated PNGs they support 24-bit color depth. Again, GIFs do not support transparency while APNGs (Animated PNGs) offer levels of up to 8 bits.

At the moment there are few browsers that support animated PNGs and currently it seems that they only work in Firefox and in the mobile version of Safari for iOS 8. When OS X Yosemite is available, Safari for Mac will also support these types of images. The test if your browser supports apngs or you do not have it below so if you see a static ball, enter this same post from Safari for iOS 8 and you will see that it moves more than it seemed at first.

It is clear that this is not something new that will change our user experience but it is striking that Apple has adopted support for APNGs as soon.