Transparency is useful when you are not certain of the background color where your image will be displayed, or when the background color is complex rather than a single color. Image formats that are most widely used to achieve transparency in web design are GIF and PNG. Still, issues related to transparency support by some web browsers may still take place. For example, if you save an image with a transparent background in the PNG format and then open the image inside Microsoft Internet Explorer or another Web browser, the image background may appear to be gray rather than transparent. Support for alpha transparency was really poor with older IE versions (like IE6 and older ones). Now that it has significantly improved, and with some handy JavaScript and CSS tricks to account for older browsers, we can use PNG images to greatly enhance our design methods. All other notable browsers—including Firefox, Netscape 6 and higher, Mozilla, Opera 6, Safari, and Camino—offer full support for PNG transparency. PNG image format is able to reduce the image size without affecting the image quality. This image format was developed to replace GIF. The advantages of PNG over GIF include greater compression, greater color depth, and alpha-channel transparency. Still, PNG is not the most popular image format for web designers, although it offers more extensive transparency support. Web designers are often required to create GIF versions of their images to accommodate older browsers. The functionality of both GIF and PNG image formats is supported by ImageConverter Plus. Conversion in between these two formats helps avoid transparency issues and add special artistic effects.