10 ms·
The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
- marshallford 14y agoFinally.
- gmac 14y agoOr: wow! Only now?
- Avshalom 14y agopoor support/awareness of animated PNGs has been keeping GIF well represented for ages
- eggspurt 14y agoSee http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/ http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
- tracker1 14y agoNeither APNG or MNG are supported in 2 of the big 3 browsers. If either format were supported in 2/3 of IE, Chrome/Webkit and Firefox/Gecko, it would get picked up by the other within 2 releases. Unfortunately the webkit/gecko guys are punting to the libpng guys, and nobody has budged.
- milliams 14y agoAbout bloody time.
- twodayslate 14y agoNow if only animated pngs were more supported http://caniuse.com/apng http://caniuse.com/apng
- gue5t 14y agoWebkit's stance is basically "we're only doing it if upstream libpng supports it" (because APNG support basically requires a couple hooks in libpng itself) but the libpng devs refuse to accept the patch for apng support because they are of the opinion that libpng should process only PNG, not derivative formats, which is what they consider APNG.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoIn fairness I can see it from the libpng guy's perspective. It will make their library larger and potentially less fit for a certain purpose. Why hasn't someone forked libpng, added the apng patch and then made it available for WebKit? Then everyone is happy. Just needs a middle-man.
- rkuykendall-com 14y agoBecause then the upkeep and maintenance of the PNG library for webkit relies on a middle-man.
- maxst 14y agoNo need to fork libpng. Currently, vanilla libpng and apng patch are both hosted on sourceforge, and it's trivial to automatically download both and apply the patch. In fact, a few distros (Arch, Gentoo, Mandriva, FreeBSD) already do exactly that for their libpng packages. But keep in mind that apng patch only adds a few functions to libpng API, and it's entirely up to applications to actually use those API calls to request extra frames.
- eggspurt 14y agoAt the PNG Group we designed the MNG format for animated images, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics
- sk5t 14y agoMore numerous perhaps, but not more important--going by the insane explosion in animated GIFs in the last two years... I think folks would have stuck by JPEG if it offered transparency.
- Zirro 14y ago"...going by the insane explosion in animated GIFs in the last two years... I think folks would have stuck by JPEG if it offered transparency." That does not make sense as JPEG doesn't support animation. Regardless, the blurriness caused by normal JPEG-compression levels makes it a bad option for most non-photo images.
- prezjordan 14y agoI believe parent was saying PNG folks would have stuck with JPEG if it offered transparency.
- Zirro 14y agoIndeed, it seems that way after reading through it again and inserting a dot. I would still argue that images used in the layout of the average site, most of which are already prone to having transparent parts, are better off using a lossless rather than a lossy format.
- sesqu 14y agoYou're underestimating the number of non-photographic JPEG files in use despite lacking transparency. It appears a significant number of people don't care about artifacts. That said, JPEG does today support lossless compression, if you really want to go there. It sort of even supports transparency[1]. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772760 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772760 for a javascript solution; other approaches use container formats
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoAnimated GIF, the royalty-free web video standard that Apple and Microsoft couldn't prevent you from using.
- jug6ernaut 14y agoI know nothing behind the standard that is "GIF". But am i the only one who thinks its completely unreasonable that a few GIF's can turn my browser into a 5fps mess? How is there not a better option for this?
- chris_wot 14y agoIf that's a reproducible issue, have you considered filing a bug?
- jug6ernaut 14y agoI assumed this was widely known/accepted. Never considers filing a bug, i assume you mean for the browser right?
- CaveTech 14y agoAre you sure you're not referring to animated GIFs? The slow FPS rate occurs as they load, and is contained to the GIF itself. Surely a static GIF would not reduce your browser FPS.
- Dylan16807 14y agoDon't be so sure it's a loading issue. I very often have animated gifs play very laggily the first time they run, even when they were already fully downloaded. And across multiple browsers I have seen issues playing gifs smoothly when there is anything else in the browser using CPU.
- charonn0 14y agoI've experienced this under Firefox, and on hardware that has no excuse for breaking a sweat on any webpage. It's usually pages where there are a large number of animated GIFs (e.g. [1]) Once all the GIFs are loaded and complete one animation cycle, everything's fine. [1]: http://www.totalprosports.com/2012/12/14/the-50-best-sports-gifs-of-2012/ http://www.totalprosports.com/2012/12/14/the-50-best-sports-...
- duiker101 14y agoI really wonder why GIFs are still around. Apart for being used as short videos for funny things they have not a huge use afaik. They really feel like an old technology. They are also a pain to support on android.
- zokier 14y ago> Apart for being used as short videos for funny things they have not a huge use afaik I wouldn't be surprised if those short videos were the bulk of the GIFs around. At least of the GIFs actually used and being dormant in some long forgotten archives.
- sesqu 14y agoGIFs are simpler, more widely supported, animated, and in many common cases result in smaller filesizes. But I believe the real reason they're still around is people don't want to fix what isn't broken. There are a lot of cases where PNGs are superior, mostly because of the extra color depth. But that's not enough for a speedy transition.
- zuppy 14y agoI think it's because of IE. I know IE sopports transparent PNGs for quite a while, but until not very long ago there were not so many options and people don't really like to upgrade IE apparently.
- ygra 14y agoBinary transparency PNGs (i.e. no separate alpha channel) have worked in IE since at least 6. So except for animation support there really is no reason to use GIF.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- iso-8859-1 14y agoSome GIF's compress to less data, even after running pngout/optipng/pngcrush.
- martinced 14y ago"The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF"... On the Web! PNG has been more popular than GIF since a very long time for basically anything non-web needing lossless picture compression. From smartphones icons to OS icons, software logos and icons, etc. I'd say the proportion is about 100:1. Actually I was suprised while just running a "find" on my Linux distro to even find a few .gif files. But thousands of PNGs, of course. Screenshots taken from OS X and Linux are saved to PNG files (for OS X it actually depends on the version of OS X, sometimes PDF are used, but not GIFs). And games... Lots of games ship with PNG pictures (as well as jpg of course). But GIF? Common... It's actually a very, very long time that PNG files are more popular than GIFs. Glad to hear that it's now true for the Web too.
- fein 14y ago> Screenshots taken from OS X and Linux are saved to PNG files You can really save screenies in whatever format you like on linux with imagemagick. It's just $ import -window root screenshot.<imagetype> Unless you're referring to whatever the DE has implemented, but I've never taken an SS without using the terminal, so I have no idea.
- randomdata 14y agoI'm sure he is referring to the desktop environment interface, as on OS X you could do the following to save to whatever format you wish as well: screencapture -tjpg desktop.jpg
- anotherbadlogin 14y agoOn OS X, Grab still inexplicably saves as TIFF, and there's no way to change it despite years of bitching from users. GJ, Apple.
- charonn0 14y agoMS Paint under Windows (since Vista) saves all images by default as PNG.
- 14y ago
- hippich 14y agoI believe the only reasonable use of GIFs today is to use for all kinds of 1px gradients for background where you can't use CSS3 for that. And even if image is big - it might be better off with PNG. basically, if you use just few colors and no semi-transparency and you picture is small - yo might be better off with GIF, otherwise - either PNG or JPG depending on if you need semi-transparency or not, and if you need loss-less compression or not.
- jsalinas 14y agoActually, PNG 8 is better for that 1px graphics: http://www.phpied.com/give-png-a-chance/ http://www.phpied.com/give-png-a-chance/
- monsterix 14y agoWonder what happened to the WebP format from Google? Last when I tried using it, there were no nice image converters that would convert my PNGs into WebP properly. Any live websites using it?
- ahoge 14y agoMozilla is still against it. Makes me kinda angry, actually. They killed MNG/JNG, because it added like 100kB to the installer and because we should just use Flash instead (seriously). It's now a decade later and we still don't have a lossy RGBA format. If quantized PNG8s aren't good enough, you can only use gigantic PNG32 files, which are over 5 times larger than JNG or WebP files. I've seen websites which were over 5MB thanks to that limitation. It's ridiculous. I wish they had at least kept JNG. It's a fairly simple JPG/PNG mashup format. If you already use JPG and PNG libraries, supporting JNG won't add much weight.
- monsterix 14y agoActually this is a non-issue. You could always implement comma separated image fallbacks[1]: background-image: image("wavy.svg", 'wavy.png' , "wavy.gif"); and so on... It seems that Google lowered emphasis on the project, or is still working on it behind-the-scenes. I'd much prefer to have 'less of images' moving over the web (without cutting back on visuals, you know) and save precious bandwidth. [1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-images/#image-fallbacks http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-images/#image-fallbacks And then the fact that Google Chrome has over 30% market share. Makes sense to promote WebP.
- ahoge 14y agoThat only works for background images. Plus, the UA will send a request for the webp image even if it can't read the format. It needs the mime type to figure that out.
- monsterix 14y agoAh yes. Then probably paste image raw data in the second fallback image? Though I do agree with you that something which benefits the web should be adopted across the board.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoAnd this particular circle is complete. Of course the patents that were the heart of such controversy are now expired so GIF code is no longer 'not-open' but it has a bad reputation so we don't play with it any more :-). I like PNG though, the library development, while a bit rocky at first, matured quite nicely and about 5 years ago crossed the point where enough people took the time to figure out how to use it that is dropped into everything that dealt with images. That has been pretty handy.
- eli 14y agoYup, great point. I think if there weren't patent concerns over GIF years ago, there wouldn't have been nearly as wide support for the format, which means far fewer people would be using it today.
- darkstalker 14y agoWhat happened to JPEG 2000? It supports lossless too, but never seen it implemented on browsers.
- ComputerGuru 14y agoRoyalty and licensing issues. It's heavily encumbered with patents. As far as the actual quality:compression goes (both lossy and lossless), it kicked ass. But with so many free options, why bother?
- eggspurt 14y agoThe image quality improvements with JPEG2000 were mathematical but not really perceptual, see http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~jakulin/jpeg/artifacts.htm http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~jakulin/jpeg/artifacts.htm
- No1 14y agoThose photographic comparisons are pretty subjective and zoom in on muddy/blurred areas of the image for comparison - it would have been nice to see the entire photos. The non-photographic images clearly give JPEG2000 an edge, but he then compares it to PNG. Lossy compression isn't for compressing things like pictures of text, which this guy notes but makes the comparison anyway. The output quality is also codec dependent, and the one used in those tests has been shown to be towards the back of the pack in a 2005 shoot-out[1]. There is also no comparison between lossless JPEG2000 and PNG on a photograph. [1] http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/jpeg2000_codecs_comparison_en.html http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/jpeg2000_codecs...
- No1 14y agoThere was a Firefox extension that supported JPEG 2000, it worked great on the few photography-related websites that used the format. It seems patents killed off the format for widespread acceptance. Maybe we'll actually get to use it in 2020 (when the patents will have expired).
- potomak 14y agoThat's why I made Draw![1][2] pixel art animation editor! [1] http://drawbang.com http://drawbang.com [2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drawbang/id578228937 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drawbang/id578228937
- 89a 14y agoor http://gifpaint.com http://gifpaint.com
- Tichy 14y agoAlthough I noticed (accidentally) that gif animated boobs seem to become more popular, that could be a thread to PNG domination.
- conradfr 14y agoIt would have been sooner if 8 bit PNG with alpha transparency had been implemented in Photoshop like in Fireworks.
- tobyjsullivan 14y ago18 years for that transition to happen. That may be the slowest thing to ever happen on the Internet.
- NelsonMinar 14y agoI think IPv6 is slower: 20 years since it started being developed.
- duncans 14y agoI could have done without the colour "correction" nonsense that PNG introduced: http://hsivonen.iki.fi/png-gamma/ http://hsivonen.iki.fi/png-gamma/
- midvar 14y agoI wish h264 and the upcoming hevc encoded images would become a real alternative. far better quality (for pictures especially), at a lower bitrate from what ive read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Main_Still_Picture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#M...
- rhokstar 14y agoGIF still rules on animation (long live memes!) PNG does not do animation however (love it for 32bit alpha) BUT APNG does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG
- dlitz 14y agoNovember 5, 1999: Burn All GIFs Day. http://web.archive.org/web/19991127200821/http://www.internetnews.com/wd-news/article/0,1087,10_232741,00.html http://web.archive.org/web/19991127200821/http://www.interne... Anyone else remember this?