Why does explorer hate pngs?

[MyrrhLynn]

Ok hopefully no one else made a topic about this (I even searched for one, ahh so proud of myself ) Basically I'm wondering if anyone else has found it annoying that mozilla/firefox supports the wonder and beauty that is pngs, while Internet Explorer does not.

Personally it annoys me constantly, since pngs are so much better then gifs, but I can't use pngs since it would look horrible to most web viewers. Even if explorer eventually supports pngs there will still be all the people on the old explorer browser versions that you would have to consider. Which means that pngs won't be useable for a wide audience on the internet for years!

Haha, in case anyone is guessing, I just made a layout where I wanted transparancy and I had to use stupid gifs to make it. Otherwise normally it doesn't annoy me quite that much.

[Slater]

...? IE doesn't support .png? That's news to me...
yet again, I don't use IE.

Recommendation: Run a spyware check.

[Arnobius]

I also like to use PNGs, and have not had problems with IE

I suppose it could be like fwrl said, or it could be another program took over the display of pngs, and is giving you grief.

IIRC, pngs are basically a royalty free version of GIFs

[blkmage]

Internet Explorer supports PNGs, but they do not support a very useful feature of PNGs: alpha transparency.

Alpha is much better than GIF transparency. GIF transparency depends on a colour that you paint on that will become 'transparent.' PNGs use alpha channels, which allows for transparency to be variable.

That is, you can have some amazing effects with PNGs that you normall can't achieve with GIFs, like gradients or shadows. Heck, you can even create a half transparent image and everything in the background will appear through the picture.

Since IE does not support alpha channels in PNGs, anything that is supposed to be even slightly transparent will be rendered in an ugly grey colour.

This is one of the reasons I really, really hate IE.

[Slater]

I did not know that about pngs... but can pngs be animated?

[LorentzForce]

That's the only downside of PNG file format; no animation. But it's no biggy, because animated GIFs in websites are annoying enough...

As for IE, they're lazy developers.

My website will soon use this transparency effect to do some awesome things, so stay tuned! Still writing the backend code of it... Too bad IE users will see everything in grey and nothing else.

[MyrrhLynn]

...? IE doesn't support .png? That's news to me...
yet again, I don't use IE.

Recommendation: Run a spyware check.

Opps yeah I guess I should have said that explorer supports pngs the file type, but they don't support transparency for pngs like blkmage explained. Pngs never get that white jaggie problem around the image like gifs are famous for, and they support more colors so you picture can have more complex shadows/highlights, etc.

[Kaligraphic]

Opera supports PNG alpha transparency just fine as well.

I suspect part of the reason that IE 6 does not is that it is four years old. (and coded by drunk monkeys) IE 7 is supposed to properly implement PNG alpha transparency, but is only in beta.

[Fsiphskilm]

IE can do PNGs but not Transparent PNGs.

[shooraijin]

... except for those people who are still using 98, or corporations on Win2K (like my office PC), not to mention the XP people who just plain don't upgrade. So, while XP is the majority, and presumably IE7 will follow, there will still be many IE6 people out there.

[MyrrhLynn]

... except for those people who are still using 98, or corporations on Win2K (like my office PC), not to mention the XP people who just plain don't upgrade. So, while XP is the majority, and presumably IE7 will follow, there will still be many IE6 people out there.

Exactly that's the part that makes me really sad. It will probably be years before enough of the general population is using IE7 (or Firefox ) that it would make sense to make a site with transparent pngs.

[glitch1501]

lol, this reminds me of what happened to me last week,

i went through my site, the-difference.net and totally redid the whole gallery, i had saved 70 custom thumbnails, in png....after i was completly done, i realized that it wouldnt work in ie, im so dumb, i totally forgot, so i had to redo all of them it took forever.

i cant wait until full png is supported throughout all the browsers....

[Fsiphskilm]

yeeeaa