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Comment by martinced | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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> 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.

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

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)

  > But GIF? Common...

I think you mean uncommon.

Or "Come on..." :)

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.

> 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.

I guess 1-bit transparency was considered "good enough" in most cases, otherwise static GIFs would have disappeared years ago.

GIF-like transparency in PNG works in IE4 and later.

Only the full alpha that GIF doesn't support at all isn't working properly (but can be made to work since IE5.5).

http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2010/png-that-works/#paletted

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