After 20 years, PNG is back with renewed vigor! A new PNG spec was just released.
    • ViatorOmniumEnglish
      17•5 days ago

      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.

      • comfy
        9•5 days ago

        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.

        • ViatorOmniumEnglish
          9•5 days ago

          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.

          • comfy
            11•5 days ago

            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.

            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.

      • @mina86@lemmy.wtfEnglish
        2•5 days ago

        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 rather disagree. I’ve switched to lossless WebP for all my needs. There are practically no drawbacks and I get a smaller file.