When PNG development started in early 1995, developers decided not to incorporate support for animation, because the majority of the PNG developers felt that overloading a single file type with both still and animation features is a bad design, both for users (who have no simple way of determining to which class a given image file belongs) and for web servers (which should use a MIME type starting with image/ for stills and video/ for animations—GIF notwithstanding),[1] but work soon started on MNG as an animation-supporting version of PNG.
[5] Similarly, early versions of the Konqueror browser included MNG support but it was later dropped.
[8] However, with the expiration of LZW patents and existence of alternative file formats such as APNG, Flash and SVG, combined with lack of MNG-supporting viewers and services, web usage was far less than expected.
Most modern web browsers support animations in APNG, SVG, WebP, and WebM.
GIF images are restricted to 256 colors with limited compression, but the format is supported in all graphical web browsers and is still widely used.
This can be resource-intensive, and the animation generally cannot be saved in a portable image file or posted on imageboards.