Special Holiday Treats for Firefox 3 Users

I don’t have to list the reasons why Firefox 3 is the World’s best Web browser, you already know them but I will tell you about a very cool feature that you just may not know about. It’s APNG support. The APNG (animated PNG) specification was created by Stuart Parmenter and Vladimir Vukicevic of the Mozilla Corporation in 2004 and support for it was added to Firefox 3 trunk builds in 2007.
There’s more info about APNGs, PNGs and why they are better than GIFs below.

I’ve taken advantage of the capabilities of this wicked cool format (New England expression) and created some holiday graphics especially for Firefox 3 users to use, enjoy, and share in the form of animated snow globes featuring the Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla logos.
The animation effects will only be visible in Firefox 3.0+ (and a few other non-Mozilla based applications).
In other applications that do not support the APNG format, the graphics will appear as static PNGs with true alpha transparency so they’ll blend in nicely with whatever colored background that you use on your web pages but I made these as a special treat specifically for Firefox 3 users.

There are three different snow globes available in two different styles. Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla with or without text reading “Happy Holidays”. Each are provided for downloading as a ZIP, TGZ, or Tar + Bzip2 package that contains the following sizes and formats.

• 200×250 APNG – Logo and Happy Holidays text
• 200×200 APNG – Logo
• 125×160 APNG – Logo and Happy Holidays text
• 125×125 APNG – Logo
• 200×200 PNG – Logo
• All use a transparent background

Get the Mozilla Snow Globes

But wait, there’s more!
Also available on the same page as the snow globes are Mozilla Christmas tree ornaments based on 7 Mozilla logos for use on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Web pages, and 4 different Firefox / Thunderbird wallpapers in sizes from 1024x768px up to 1920x1200px.

Mozilla Christmas Tree Ornaments

Holiday Wallpapers



Mozilla Themed Holiday Graphics

This was all a tremendous amount of work so please Share This or Digg it

PNGs vs GIF
I’m someone who has a great interest in computer generated graphical arts and when I first learned about APNGs, my excitement was equal to that of when I first discovered tabbed browsing.
For the average Joe or Jane who may not be familiar with graphics formats, typical animated graphics that you see on the web are in animated GIF format (with more leaning towards Flash animation nowadays). Animated or not, I’ve always been a much bigger fan of PNG over GIF (and JPEG, only good for photos) for the following reasons.

(On most images) PNGs can achieve greater compression than GIFs resulting in smaller file sizes which saves disk space and makes uploading, downloading, and displaying PNGs faster.
PNG gives a much wider range of transparency options than GIF including alpha channel transparency.
PNG gives a much wider range of color depths than GIF (truecolor up to 48-bit compared to 8-bit 256-color), allowing for greater color precision, smoother fades, etc.

To put it plainly, PNGs and now APNGs provide the best looking high quality graphics that can be used on any colored background due to their true alpha transparency capabilities a feature not available in animated GIFs.

• Animat Firefox add-on Used to create the snow globe APNGs
• APNG Edit Firefox add-on The first APNG Firefox add-on
• APNG Assembler Online APNG generator
• The APNG Project
• APNG Specification Mozilla Wiki
• APNG on Wikipedia
• PNG on Wikipedia

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Thanks, and happy holidays!
Ken

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