- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
cross-posted from: https://kbin.earth/m/programming@programming.dev/t/1528736
After 20 years, PNG is back with renewed vigor! A new PNG spec was just released.
The title is hyperbole. PNG is lagging behind modern lossless formats in terms of new features.
This doesn’t mean it’s a bad format or that it shouldn’t be used. In fact, it should still be the default unless you need something it doesn’t support or really need to reduce file size.
I disagree. It is wasteful (we’re talking ~30% savings with lossless WebP or JPEG-XL) and widely misused, which matters at the massive scale of the Internet with technically inexperienced people making up plenty of those images.
Congratulations, your noob user is now using JPEG-XL. It’s not working on old devices, or any mainstream browser besides Safari. The less mature library also has a bug that allows for RCE and now everyone is running a cryptominer.
Now you say, but webp is supported everywhere, so let’s go with that. Now the noob is using wepb for a bunch of rasterised vector graphics with 4 or 5 flat colors, and he’s wasting more disk space than before.
So I repeat, if you need one size fits all, PNG is better, it works everywhere, and it’s even more efficient in cases where lossless graphics matter the most.
I just tested with this image:
Default GIMP WebP export settings (90% quality): 88.8 kB
Lossless WebP mode: 85.6 kB
Default GIMP PNG export settings (compression level 9): 189.8 kB
So I don’t trust this claim unless you have some evidence.
I rather disagree. I’ve switched to lossless WebP for all my needs. There are practically no drawbacks and I get a smaller file.