Modern graphic file formats

For years, there were just two image formats available on the Web: JPEG and GIF. One for lossy images (e.g. photos), one for lossless (e.g. icons).

Then came PNG. It was lossless, meant to replace GIF. It added transparency and better compression, which lead to smaller size, but dropped animation. (Yes, there was APNG, but it was never properly supported anywhere)

And those three were everywhere for decade or more.

There were multiple attempts to improve compression even further. For example, Google’s Guetzli for JPEG images. But all improvements were still limited by fundamental constraints of those formats, one needed to choose either lossless or lossy compression.

What if we don’t need to choose?

There are now not one, but two formats, that can efficiently handle both 12MP photos and 16×16 icons. WebP is slightly older and supported more widely, AVIF is even more compact, and has wide enough support in modern browsers.

They both support transparency, which previously was limited to lossless formats only.

So, from now on I only use AVIF images on this webpage. And if you, like me missed this silent revolution, you should consider these new formats as well.

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