11–20 of 111 posts
Now if only animated pngs were more supported http://caniuse.com/apng
I 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?
If that's a reproducible issue, have you considered filing a bug?
More 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.
"...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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...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.
I believe parent was saying PNG folks would have stuck with JPEG if it offered transparency.
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.
Now if only animated pngs were more supported http://caniuse.com/apng
Webkit'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.
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.
I 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.
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.
I 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.
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.
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.