Penguin
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An Acronym for Portable Network Graphics. Pronounced "ping".

A modern, losslessly compressed bitmapped graphics FileFormat, designated by the W3C as the successor of the GIF format. PNG is completely unencumbered with patents and licensing fees. This is important, as GIF has had problems in that regard (see Unisys). There is builtin support for PNG in Mozilla and Opera.

Recent versions of InternetExplorer display PNG images as well, however this browser does not support alpha channels natively. Rumour has it that the IE engine is too old and outdated to support transparency without lots of hideous hacks. Amusingly(?), while MicrosoftCorporation can't make these hideous hacks, they tell us how we can. Not surprisingly, their approach is completely incompatible with every other browser on the world, you should use a slightly different method.

pngcrush(1) is a Free utility to shrink your PNG images as much as possible, either losslessly or lossily depending on arguments.