Better animations in Firefox 3

Firefox 3 will support the new Animated PNG format (APNG). A simple extension to make transparent images that are superior animated GIFs. GIF images can only contain 256 colors, and lacks support for partially-transparent pixels. This results in images which often look grainy or rough, and which do not smoothly blend into their background. Below is an example of this problem:

You can see that when used on a light gray background (OS X’s default color), the throbber looks just fine because the pixels must be blended to a fixed color (the expected background). If partial transparency was supported, the antialiased pixels could be made appropriately transparent, and the animation would look fine against any background.

Here’s the throbber, now rendered as an PNG (we left out the animation, otherwise it would be an APNG that can only be viewed in supporting browsers such as the development version of Firefox 3):

 

This version clearly looks better against different backgrounds.