At the end of 1994, controversy brewed about royalties that were imposed on GIFs due to Lempel – Ziv – Welch (LZW) data compression technique used to support this image format.
Unisys, who had patented the technique a few years before, insisted that royalties were imposed on, which triggered a severe setback among developers.
The resulting battle led to the creation of the royalty -free portable network graphics (PNG) format, which is still widely used today.
So how did it come to that point? In 1987, GIFS, an abbreviation for graphics exchange format, was first released by Computer Serve. When Unisys sought retrospective royalties over the use of LZW, a working group was set up to begin the development of an alternative.
The development on this front was led by Thomas Boutell, and the working group initially chose ‘Ping’ as the name and translated into ‘ping, if not gif’.
While this was later shortened to PNG, the wheels were very turned with this point and the development accelerated quickly. Long-term problems associated with GIFs, such as its lack of 24-bit color support, were highlighted as key development priorities.
In 1996, the full specification of PNG was completed after the approval of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The benefits of PNGs
PNG files still remain very popular in 2025 with the JPEG format. In fact, these two formats have a lot of overlap, but differ in where they are used.
For example, both can handle 16 million colors. In particular, PNGs are typically used for web graphics, charts, illustrations or logos as opposed to high quality photographs.
They also take up more space than your average JPEG. This is because they use “lossless compression”, which Adobe explains means that no data is lost when the image is compressed.
“The quality remains the same, no matter how many times you edit and save the file,” noted the graphic design giant. “The image is not blurred or distorted, making PNGs ideal for sharp logos and graphs that contain lots of characters”.
In contrast, JPEGs are designed specifically for efficiency and draws on a “losing compression” technique. This means that some data is deleted when changed or reduced.
Still going strong
Despite their age, PNG pictures still go strong. Support for this image format first appeared in 1997 on Internet Explorer and in Netscape.
Support to the format was also strong during this period when the Unisys defeat had left a sour taste in many mouths. The Free Software Foundation and W3C were strong advocates of PNG images, and campaigns including ‘Burn All Gifs’, sought to touch support.
However, the adoption rates were slow. A key factor behind this was a lack of support in Internet Explorer in the early days. As the PNG format includes support for transparency, this was found to be cumbersome and buggy.
Either way, PNG still ranks among the most commonly used image file formats on the web, with the majority of the big browsers all offering support.
This includes safari, Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Microsoft Edge.
