The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

Now if only animated pngs were more supported<p><a href="http://caniuse.com/apng" rel="nofollow">http://caniuse.com/apng</a>

And this particular circle is complete.<p>Of course the patents that were the heart of such controversy are now expired so GIF code is no longer 'not-open' but it has a bad reputation so we don't play with it any more :-).<p>I like PNG though, the library development, while a bit rocky at first, matured quite nicely and about 5 years ago crossed the point where enough people took the time to figure out how to use it that is dropped into everything that dealt with images. That has been pretty handy.

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?

What happened to JPEG 2000? It supports lossless too, but never seen it implemented on browsers.

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.

It would have been sooner if 8 bit PNG with alpha transparency had been implemented in Photoshop like in Fireworks.

I could have done without the colour "correction" nonsense that PNG introduced: <a href="http://hsivonen.iki.fi/png-gamma/" rel="nofollow">http://hsivonen.iki.fi/png-gamma/</a>

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.

GIF still rules on animation (long live memes!) PNG does not do animation however (love it for 32bit alpha)<p>BUT APNG does: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG</a>

I believe the only reasonable use of GIFs today is to use for all kinds of 1px gradients for background where you can't use CSS3 for that. And even if image is big - it might be better off with PNG.<p>basically, if you use just few colors and no semi-transparency and you picture is small - yo might be better off with GIF, otherwise - either PNG or JPG depending on if you need semi-transparency or not, and if you need loss-less compression or not.

About bloody time.

I wish h264 and the upcoming hevc encoded images would become a real alternative. far better quality (for pictures especially), at a lower bitrate from what ive read.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Main_Still_Picture" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#M...</a>

November 5, 1999: Burn All GIFs Day.<p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/19991127200821/http://www.internetnews.com/wd-news/article/0,1087,10_232741,00.html" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/19991127200821/http://www.interne...</a><p>Anyone else remember this?

Although I noticed (accidentally) that gif animated boobs seem to become more popular, that could be a thread to PNG domination.

18 years for that transition to happen. That may be the slowest thing to ever happen on the Internet.

That's why I made Draw![1][2] pixel art animation editor!<p>[1] <a href="http://drawbang.com" rel="nofollow">http://drawbang.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drawbang/id578228937" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drawbang/id578228937</a>

Finally.

<i>"The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF"</i>... On the Web!<p>PNG has been more popular than GIF since a very long time for basically anything non-web needing lossless picture compression.<p>From smartphones icons to OS icons, software logos and icons, etc. I'd say the proportion is about 100:1. Actually I was <i>suprised</i> while just running a "find" on my Linux distro to even find a few .gif files. But thousands of PNGs, of course.<p>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).<p>And games... Lots of games ship with PNG pictures (as well as jpg of course). But GIF? Common...<p>It's actually a very, very long time that PNG files are more popular than GIFs.<p>Glad to hear that it's now true for the Web too.

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.<p>Any live websites using it?