IE PNG Petition

Not that it really bothers me too much as a user, (since my primary browser has proper PNG support) but as a designer, my life would be made that much easier if MSIE supported the PNG image format correctly. So, without further adieu, I present to you the Proper PNG Support in Internet Explorer for Windows online petition.

I’m not sure if anyone remembers, but a while ago, I posted this image in an entry:

That is an example of why PNG alpha transparency is cool, and why no one really uses them yet. If your browser supports the format properly, you will see a penny sitting on the background color of the page (no matter which theme you happen to be using) without the anti-aliased “fringe” so common to transparent GIF images. If your browser doesn’t (*cough* IE) you see the penny sitting in a light-grey box.

There are work-arounds for getting PNG images to display properly in IE, but the methods I’ve seen thus far seem kludgy to me.

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Robert

Robert Belknap has been writing online sporadically since 2001. See the colophon for more details.

4 thoughts on “IE PNG Petition”

  1. Opera has had decent PNG support for quite some time. What’s really odd is that MSOffice is now using PNG as its native image format, but that IE can’t get it right.

  2. [Quote] It turns out that most of the latest versions of the major browsers fully support alpha transparency with PNG—namely, Netscape 6, Opera 6, and recently-released Mozilla 1, all on Windows; and, for the Mac, Internet Explorer 5, Netscape 6, Opera 5, Mozilla 1, OmniWeb 3.1, and ICab 1.9. Incredibly, PNG even works on Opera 6 for Linux, on WebTV, and on Sega Dreamcast. [Quote]

    (from here

    I imagine will have to add Apple’s new browser Safari to that list – but I can’t check this since I don’t have a Mac running Jaguar to test on…

  3. I use Mozilla so I don’t have that problem but I would love to be able to use PNG’s as signatures on Message Boards without all other users complaining it looks crap (cuz they use IE).

    Microsoft definitely need to get their act together.

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