We have already touched upon a topic of web design transparency and some ideas why PNG is still not so popular among web designers. We can now list some advantages of PNG over GIF so that PNG gets well deserved attention. First and foremost, PNG’s natural transparency allows creating an image that can work on top of any background. Transparency of PNG is binary transparency (which is also the case of GIF images), but in combination with alpha channel PNG becomes the winner. Partially transparent pixels are what PNG can create and surpass a simple scheme when transparency is either on, or off. Although partial transparency increases the file size, this type of transparency looks more elegant on top of backgrounds. But what about browsers’ issues typically associated with PNG transparency? The good news is that all modern browsers provide support for PNG including its alpha channel transparency. These are: Safari, Firefox, Opera (version 6 and higher), Netscape (version 6 and higher), and Mozilla. Internet Explorer 6 and older versions, unfortunately, does not naturally support the PNG alpha channel (though there are ways to make this happen). Internet Explorer 7 and newer versions support the PNG alpha channel without any limitations. So, technical advantages of PNG over GIF are vivid, and we advise you to make more use of PNG images when dealing with transparency. Flawless conversion to and from PNG is guaranteed with ImageConverter Plus. Depending on color depth, you can specify whether or not you would like the alpha channel to be supported.