At the end of 1994, the controversy was brewing on royalties that are imposed on the GIF due to the Lempel -ZIV -WELCH -WELCH (LZW) data compression used to underpin this image format.
Unisys, who had patented the technique some years before, insisted that royalties were imposed, which caused a fierce reaction among developers.
The resulting battle led to the creation of the graphics format of gridage free networks (PNG), which is still widely used today.
So how did he get to that point? In 1987, Compuserve first launched an abbreviation for the graphics exchange format. When Unisys sought retrospective royalties about the use of LZW, a working group was established to begin the development of an alternative.
The development on this front was directed by Thomas Boutell, and the working group initially chose ‘ping’ as the name, translating to “ping if not GIF”.
While this was shortened to PNG, the wheels were turning a lot at that point and the development accelerated quickly. The long -term problems associated with GIF, such as their lack of 24 -bit color support, stood out as key development priorities.
By 1996, PNG’s complete specification was ended after the approval of the World Wide Web consortium (W3C).
The benefits of PNG
PNG files remain very popular in 2025 along with the JPEG format. In fact, these two formats have a lot of overlap, but differ in the place where they are used.
Both, for example, can handle 16 million colors. In particular, PNGs are typically used for web graphics, graphics, illustrations or logos, instead of high quality photographs.
They also occupy more space than their average jpeg. This is because they use “lossless compression”, what Adobe explains means that data is not lost when the image is compressed.
“The quality remains the same no matter how many times edit and save the file,” said the graphic design giant. “The image will not become blurred or distorted, which makes PNG ideal for clear logos and graphics that contain many figures.”
On the contrary, JPEGs are specifically designed for efficiency, based on a “compression with loss” technique. This means that some data is deleted when they are altered or made smaller.
It is still strong
Despite their age, PNG images remain strong. The support for this image format appeared for the first time in 1997 on the Internet Explorer and in Netscape.
The support for the format was also strong during this period, with Unisys’ debacle of having left a sour taste in many mouths. Free Software Foundation and W3C were strong defenders of PNG images, and campaigns that include ‘Burn All Gif’ sought their support.
However, adoption rates were slow. A key factor behind this was the lack of support on the Internet Explorer during the first days. As the PNG format includes transparency support, this was problematic and with errors.
Anyway, PNG is still among the most used image file formats on the web, with most of the main browsers that offer support.
This includes Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Microsoft Edge.
