Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

w3techs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 111 posts

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

#81

Post by monsterix »

ahoge wrote: post #70
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…

Actually 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

And then the fact that Google Chrome has over 30% market share. Makes sense to promote WebP.

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

#82

Post by bad_user »

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…

PNG would have won a long time ago on the web, if it wasn't for IExplorer.

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

#83

Post by kijin »

bad_user wrote: post #82
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…

PNG would have won a long time ago on the web, if it wasn't for IExplorer.

I assume you're talking about IE6 not supporting alpha-channel transparency and IE7 getting the gamma wrong?

Both of those problems can be easily fixed (in most cases) by using iepngfix for IE6 and stripping gamma information from your PNGs (which you should do anyway, to minimize the size of your images). I've been using PNGs successfully in my projects for several years, and during most of those years I had to support IE6/7. In fact, if you need to support any version of IE, PNG should be the least of your problems.

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

#84

Post by maxst »

kijin wrote: post #83
bad_user wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PNG would have won a long time ago on the web, if it wasn't for IExplorer.

I assume you're talking about IE6 not supporting alpha-channel transparency and IE7 getting the gamma wrong? Both of those problems can be easily fixed (in most cases) by using iepngfix for IE6 and stripping gamma information from your PNGs (which you should do anyway, to minimize the size of your images). I've been using PNGs successfully in my projects for several years, and during most of those years I had to supp…

> can be easily fixed (in most cases) by using iepngfix for IE6

It could be even more easily fixed by using GIFs instead. I assume that's what many people thought. Thankfully, IE6 is finally dead and no one have to worry about PNGs anymore.

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

#85

Post by kijin »

maxst wrote: post #84
kijin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're talking about IE6 not supporting alpha-channel transparency and IE7 getting the gamma wrong? Both of those problems can be easily fixed (in most cases) by using iepngfix for IE6 and stripping gamma information from your PNGs (which you should do anyway, to minimize the size of your images). I've been using PNGs successfully in my projects for several years, and during most of those years I had to supp…

> can be easily fixed (in most cases) by using iepngfix for IE6 It could be even more easily fixed by using GIFs instead. I assume that's what many people thought. Thankfully, IE6 is finally dead and no one have to worry about PNGs anymore.

GIF doesn't support alpha channel transparency, so you won't be fixing the same problem.

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

#87

Post by mherkender »

twodayslate wrote: post #5

Now if only animated pngs were more supported http://caniuse.com/apng

I have to say, I never understood the need for a gif-like animation in a png-like format. Gifs have incredibly basic animation that's difficult to control in most (all?) browsers, and it's pretty useless for everything except brief clips on tumblr.

Here's your animated png format, put all frames of the animation in a png sprite sheet, and fill early pixels with metadata. Add in a small library and you've got a format that's allows for more advanced animation than gifs, with the better compression and alpha of pngs, and is supported right now in any browser with decent canvas support.

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

#88

Post by drchaos »

csense wrote: post #68
ben0x539 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://caniuse.com/#search=video

The percentage of users not able to use is roughly equivalent to the percentage of users running IE8, which is about 20% right now, and probably will stay there in the near future, as XP users cannot upgrade to IE9 (thanks, MS!).

The other problem with is that there is still no common format which every browser supports, so even if you would ignore IE8 (or provide a fallback via Flash) you'd still have to encode all videos twice (to H.264 and WebM/VP8).

Sad as it is, but Flash for video and animated GIF will stay with us for some years.

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

#89

Post by biot »

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…

  > But GIF? Common...
I think you mean uncommon.

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

#90

Post by duaneb »

salmanapk wrote: post #77
snogglethorpe wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebP seemed fairly pointless; its advantages over existing formats were slim, it had some disadvantages , and lacked any compelling new functionality (e.g. good HDR support). Basically it was pretty "meh." Given the huge effort required to get any sort of widespread adoption of a new format—and without widespread adoption there's little point unless you've got some unusual features (which WebP didn't)—I'm not sure th…

>JPEG XR†, seems vastly superior to WebP in almost every way No animations duh.

Is that really a problem? I would much prefer animated gifs never existed.
Post reply on HN