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PNG vs. GIF

I'm writing this on the day the European Parliament will decide about software patent; that is somehow appropriate. The main motive for the development of the PNG format was the fact that GIFs use a patented compression algorithm. In the USA, this patent expired with 2003-06-20. In some other countries, it is still valid. In many countries the LZW compression was never patented at all.

But PNGs are not really a replacement for GIFs, they are something different. In many cases, they can be an interesting alternatives for JPGs as well. In other cases, a GIF is (patents aside) still the better solution.

PNG has the better compression, but a larger header. Therefore, if an image is very small and/or has very few colors, the GIF format will often result in a smaller file. An example are the FF6 faces.
It is completely pointless to zip up a PNG file. PNG already uses the ZIP compression, so it will usually just result in an increase of the filesize by the ZIP header. This practice is very popular among RPG Maker 2000 resource pages, and a constant annoyance.
With larger images, PNGs will get considerably smaller than GIFs. They can be a very interesting alternative to JPGs when posting screenshots. JPG is a lossy compression, very good for photographs, but may result in a dulling of highlights in computer graphics.

PNG support among browsers is meanwhile rather good.

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2003-11-22, last modified 2004-11-16