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The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

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Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

#61

Post by eggspurt »

maxst wrote: post #58
eggspurt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the PNG Group we designed the MNG format for animated images, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics

I remember you guys wanted to create simplified MNG 2.0, without stuff like MAGN and delta-PNG. What happened to it?

Honestly, I tuned out. Animations are procedural and are best represented with a scripting language - not with a declarative image format. Resource-constraining javascript within an (i)frame is probably a better way to spend a browser developer's time.

Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

#62

Post by pablasso »

nollidge wrote: post #22
jug6ernaut wrote: post #8

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?

I think that's unreasonable, especially because it's never happened to me in recent memory.

Maybe not 5PFS but happens to me too when page has many gifs.

Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

#63

Post by vacri »

charonn0 wrote: post #40
martinced wrote: post #15

"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 thousand…

MS Paint under Windows (since Vista) saves all images by default as PNG.

Pre-vista it was .bmp and not .gif, if memory serves.

Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

#64

Post by vacri »

sk5t wrote: post #7

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.

jpegs are for photos, and are the wrong thing to use for things like icons, screenshots, web images and so forth.

Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

#65

Post by joelg236 »

vacri wrote: post #63
charonn0 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS Paint under Windows (since Vista) saves all images by default as PNG.

Pre-vista it was .bmp and not .gif, if memory serves.

Your memory serves you correctly. (just tested on an xp machine)

Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

#66

Post by maxst »

eggspurt wrote: post #61
maxst wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember you guys wanted to create simplified MNG 2.0, without stuff like MAGN and delta-PNG. What happened to it?

Honestly, I tuned out. Animations are procedural and are best represented with a scripting language - not with a declarative image format. Resource-constraining javascript within an (i)frame is probably a better way to spend a browser developer's time.

I believe there is a niche for simple animations: just a sequence of frames in a loop. No need for JavaScript, since it's just a simple loop. Easy to upload to image hosting services. And all browsers already support such simple-loop animated GIFs, so the code is already there, just not utilized to full (true color) potential.

Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

#67

Post by randomdata »

fein wrote: post #36
martinced wrote: post #15

"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 thousand…

> 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. 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.

I'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

Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

#68

Post by csense »

ben0x539 wrote: post #50
duiker101 wrote: post #14

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 wonder what the pain point that is stopping the wider public from switching to a real video format for those short clips is. Given that real video codecs have much better compression at comparable quality, is it just the lack of simple tiny video hosting options comparable to imgur? tags being harder to use on random posting platforms than ? Chroma subsampling "blurring" clips with sharp edges like from cartoons or…

An tag pointing to animated gif should work on every combination of image host + CMS + browser.

I'm not sure off the top of my head what HTML 5 market share is like (anyone with recent data want to chime in?), but I'm guessing lots of people are running browsers that still don't have capability.

Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

#69

Post by unconed »

vacri wrote: post #64
sk5t wrote: post #7

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.

jpegs are for photos, and are the wrong thing to use for things like icons, screenshots, web images and so forth.

Actually, in a Retina world, it is often better to use a low quality JPEG at high res, than a high quality PNG at low res.

Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

#70

Post by ahoge »

monsterix wrote: post #28

Wonder 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?

Mozilla 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.

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