GIF vs WebP vs APNG: The Animated Image Format War Nobody Won

The GIF format was created in 1987 by Steve Wilhite at CompuServe. It supports a maximum of 256 colors per frame. It uses LZW compression, which has been patent-free since 2004. And despite being nearly four decades old, despite every technical limitation that makes engineers cringe, it refuses to die. Not because it is good, but because nothing has managed to fully replace it. GIF's 256-color limitation is its defining constraint. Each frame in a GIF animation is an indexed-color image, meaning every pixel references one of at most 256 entries in a color palette. The palette can be different for each frame, a trick that some advanced encoders use to squeeze out better quality, but no individual frame can display more than 256 simultaneous colors. For photographic content, this means aggressive color quantization: reducing millions of colors to 256, inevitably losing detail and creating visible banding in gradients. This is where dithering comes in, and it is genuinely clever. Ditherin