webfork wrote: ↑Fri Aug 30, 2019 7:39 pmAgain, I'm not sure I trust that as it's Google data talking about Google's formats doing well. Like the various WEBP tests I looked into, seeing better data (in this case from an independent source) would be ideal.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers were accurate. I want to advocate for APNG because there's not really another replacement for GIF files. Every other animation output I've seen is a lossy format, which doesn't give rise to the collaboration that made GIF such an institution. Of all the graphics formats out there, GIF really needs to get replaced.
If you had examples that pointed to such trends skewing/tampering it'd certainly be interesting, though I expect it's mostly due to like you said a player like Google being able to accelerate adoption of tech they implement in their offerings (APNG as we know wasn't native to Chrome for the longest time and with Chrome-based browsers becoming dominant market wise that makes a big difference, though in fairness both formats serve quite different use cases).
As it is, WebP is an image based offshot from their open source VPx video codec which saw adoption by browsers due in part to pushing against the commercial licensing of AVC/HEVC (h.264, h.265, respectively). HEVC support wasn't ever supported in Firefox or Chromium for that reason (even if the OS/hardware supports it and they could allow native decoding!).
For comparison if we look at results for 'VP8' vs 'h.264'
trends (directly competing and comparable video tech) we see the results for AVC vastly outnumber those of VP8. All up the users win though since this open vs closed source competition has lead to some excellent open source and adopted codecs (with AV1, the successor to VPx now having backing from a host of major companies like Intel, Nvidia, etc).