At the end of 1994, the controversy was preparing on the royalties imposed on GIFs due to the Lempel – ZIV – Welch (LZW) data compression technique used to underlie this image format.
Unisys, which had patented the technique a few years ago, insisted that the royalties were imposed, which sparked a fierce reaction among the developers.
The resulting battle has led to the creation of the format of portable network (PNG) free of rights, which is still widely used today.
So how did it get to this point? In 1987, GIFS, an abbreviation for the graphic exchange format, was published for the first time by Compuserve. When the Unisys asked for retrospective fees on the use of LZW, a working group was created to start the development of an alternative.
The development on this front was led by Thomas Boutell, and the working group initially chose the “ping” as a name, translating into “ping if not gif”.
Although it was then shortened in PNG, the wheels turned at that time and the development accelerated quickly. The long -term problems associated with GIFs, such as its lack of support for 24 -bit colors, have been highlighted as key development priorities.
In 1996, the complete specification of the PNG was finalized following the approval of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The advantages of PNGs
PNG files are still very popular in 2025 alongside JPEG format. In fact, these two formats have a lot of overlap, but differ in their use.
Both, for example, can manage 16 million colors. In particular, PNGs are generally used for web graphics, graphics, illustrations or logos, as opposed to high quality photographs.
They also take up more space than your average JPEG. Indeed, they use “lossless compression”, which explains Adobe means that no data is lost when the image is compressed.
“The quality remains the same, regardless of the number of times you change and save the file,” noted the graphic design giant. “The image will not become blurred or distorted, which makes PNG ideals for net logos and graphics containing many figures”.
On the other hand, JPEGs are designed specifically for efficiency, based on a “compression with loss” technique. This means that certain data is deleted when changed or enhanced.
Always strong
Despite their age, the PNG images are always strong. The management of this image format appeared for the first time in 1997 on the Internet Explorer and in Netscape.
Support for format was also solid during this period, the unisys debacle that has left sour taste in many mouths. The Free Software Foundation and the W3C were solid supporters of PNG images, and campaigns, including “Burn All Gifs”, sought to arouse support.
The adoption rates were however slow. A key factor behind it was the lack of support in the Internet Explorer at the start. As the PNG format includes the management of transparency, it turned out to be embarrassing and buggy.
Be that as it may, PNG is still classified among the most used image file formats on the web, the majority of the main browsers all offering assistance.
This includes Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Microsoft Edge.