I don’t know what a .webp file is but I don’t like it. They’re like a filthy prank version of the image/gif you’re looking for. They make you jump through all these hoops to find the original versions of the files that you can actually do anything with.
So basically what APNG tried to be?
APNG is lossless.
True. Why did it remain relatively unknown while webp seems to have taken off?
libpng refused to accept it
mozilla made it because it suited their needs; and libpng (the organisation behind png, and who make the standard png decoder) refused to add compatibility, insisting on mng instead. mng was bad, so nobody used it; and apng was great, but require mozillas version of the decoder so systems couldn’t use both the official version and the apng supporting version together
Ah, so it was people being prideful idiots because it didn’t come from their own fiefdom.
partly, i don’t think it was just that. mng did have considerable benefits over apng at the time; but it was a solution looking for a problem. i think they wanted it to succeed because they’d poured time into it, but nobody wanted to support it (mozilla, the only browser to support it to my knowledge, dropped support eventually because the mng decoder was bigger than every other image decoder in firefox put together)
To add to the reply you got, WebP is lossy. Meaning that WebP files are smaller. APNG only added animation and nothing else.