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For quite some time TIFF was the default format for screenshots on OS X, which was probably one of its more prominent uses by the general public. During that period it was also pretty common for developers to use TIFF for application assets like toolbar icons and splash screens.

At some point that all shifted over to PNG, but macOS support for TIFF remains good to this day.

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It’s because TIFF and Postscript are friends.

Source: NeXTStep ;-)

I'll never pass up the opportunity to add random NeXT trivia -- Grab.app is one of several applications that came from NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP with relatively few modifications, along with Preview.app, Terminal.app, TextEdit.app, Chess.app, and probably many others.

For anyone with curiosity and time to burn, comparing early OS X with NeXT/OpenSTEP in VMs is fun, just to see what changed and what stayed. Some parts are extremely different, while some software seemed to be copy-pasted over, while others clearly had a lot of polish put into them for the consumer market. Fun times!

Preview existed in OpenStep?

Hmm, I don't remember TIFF for screen shots. It was PDF (perhaps PDF-wrapped TIFF?) ca 2002–4 which is not too long after the first usable OS X.

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