alt Hacker NewsOnce you add more than 256 different colours in total, GIF explodes in terms of file size. It's great for small, compact images with limited colour information, but it can't compete with APNG when the image becomes more detailed than what you'd find on Geocities.
No, APNG explodes in size in that case.
In APNG it's either the same 256 colors for the whole animation, or you have to use 24-bit color. That makes the pixel data 3 times larger, which makes zlib's compression window effectively 3 times smaller, hurting compression.
OTOH GIF can add 256 new colors with each frame, so it can exceed 256 colors without the cost of switching all the way to 16.7 million colors.