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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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