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For all of those who have ever seriously made a webpage, I'm sure you have experienced some of Internet Explorer's nicer features, like its inability to work with PNG files properly...

Well today I was working on a design using PNG8 (8bit PNG's) and I even disabled transparency. It was all looking groovy in Firefox (as usual) and so I thought "well I'll have to try it in IE sooner or later", and to my horror I saw that IE couldn't even handle PNG8's (without transparency) properly.

With a little research I found this tool:
http://ardfry.com/pngoutwin/

This tool takes a PNG and not only tries to compress it - but also seems to fix it.

I use Photoshop CS2 to make my PNG's and it seems that PS cant output PNG's properly... After dumping my files through that tool, the PNG8's appear perfectly in IE and in Firefox!!

And to answer a question I know one of you will ask - I didn't use GIF's because the filesize was larger (although not by much)... JPEG's also came out larger too, and worse quality. By the time I'd ramped up the JPEG compression to a point where I could accept the quality the filesizes were about 4x larger.

Anywho - I hope this helps some people and saves their sanity - shame the tool is Trialware (although its only £8.52 to buy ($19.95))..

ah good, its not just me then. I'm using 5, but my sister-in-law has CS.

each file format has its pros & cons.
i wouldnt use a png for a pixelshim as the overhead is larger using pngs.
i havent had an issue with pngs but i will look into that.
I do like pngs for the colour control when developing for clients.
if you make a 1x1 1 colour gif / png / jpg
you may get a rude shock, gif will always be smaller.

its the reason why years ago i had to prove to some newb in irc that my kangaroo image was 666 bytes instead of 1k+ with using gif format.

however yes png does have its adavantages but used in the correct context and for the right purpose.

Indi - i agree entirely. I always do a test, when I export my image I run it through a GIF, PNG and JPEG to see which one comes out best.

For tiny images, GIF has less overhead, for small-medium I find PNG is best, for large simple image (ie, large blocks of solid colour) I find PNG is also best... For large complicate images it has to be JPEG.

Interesting tool, gonna look into it.

Doesn't seem like you can make a good modern website anymore without PNG, so this should be a life-saver.