Roughly in the way the "Burn All GIFs" [1] campaign became obsolete: the patents expired, removing the original objection, but nonetheless alternative formats are now better anyway.
Wow. I remember the initial hype for animated PNGs, meant to replace animated GIFs. We all expected it to happen in a matter of a few months, and that must have been nearly a decade ago now? It took 2-3 years before I simply gave up on checking to see if support had rolled out. To this day I have never seen an animated PNG in action.
Animated GIFs continue to reign as king. Image hosts' demand to reduce outbound bandwidth costs finally culminated in the .gifv "format". IIRC it's nothing more than a WebM or MP4 video without an audio track, targeted at the html5 <video> element.
What is the real reason why animated PNG was not rolled out years ago when we were all eagerly awaiting its arrival? Was the process encumbered for legal reasons, or was it simply not prioritized as an easily checked off box by the major players (ie: browsers)?
APNG was invented by Mozilla and not standardized with a "legit" organization (IETF/W3C). I guess Chrome/Safari/IE were reluctant to adopt a not-really-standard. Safari eventually did though, and now finally it's in Chrome beta.
Yeah "gifv" is what I mentioned, and it's the way forward. The bandwidth used by GIFs made from movie clips is ridiculous! APNG wouldn't be that much better since it's also lossless. But APNG will be nice for animations that have to be lossless.
APNG works fine here on Safari, and it seems to be supported by everyone but IE/Edge and (strangely) the new Opera w/ Blink, but that may be because Chrome apparently added support starting with 59 in March?
[0] https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/playogg/en/