and up. Chromium 59.0 added APNG support, followed by Google Chrome. Opera supported APNG in versions 10–12.1, but support lapsed in version 15 when it switched to the Blink rendering engine; support was re-added in Opera 46 (inherited from Chromium 59). Microsoft Edge has supported APNG since version 79.0, when it switched to a Chromium-based engine. The PNG Group decided in April 2007 not to embrace APNG. Several alternatives were under discussion, including ANG, aNIM/mPNG, "PNG in GIF" and its subset "RGBA in GIF". However, currently only APNG has widespread support. Examples Displayed in the fashion of hex editors, with on the left side byte values shown in hex format, and on the right side their equivalent characters from ISO-8859-1 with unrecognized and control characters replaced with periods. Additionally the PNG signature and individual chunks are marked with colors. Note they are easy to identify because of their human readable type names (in this example PNG, IHDR, IDAT, and IEND). Advantages Reasons to use this International Standard may be: Portability: Transmission is independent of the software and hardware platform. Completeness: it's possible to represent truecolor, indexed-color, and greyscale images. Coding and decoding in series: allows to generate and read data streams in series, that is, the format of the data stream is used for the generation and visualization of images at the moment through serial communication. Progressive presentation: to be able to transmit data flows that are initially an approximation of the entire image and progressively they improve as the data flow is received. Soundness to transmission errors: detects the transmission errors of the data stream correctly. Losslessness: No loss: filtering and compression preserve all information. Efficiency: any progressive image presentation, compression and filtering seeks efficient decoding and presentation. Compression: images can be compressed efficiently and consistently. Easiness: the implementation of the standard is easy. Interchangeability: any PNG decoder that follows the standards can read all PNG data streams. Flexibility: allows future extensions and private additions without affecting the previous point. Freedom of legal restrictions: the algorithms used are free and accessible. Comparison with other file formats Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) On small images, GIF can achieve greater compression than PNG (see the section on filesize, below). On most images, except for the above case, a GIF file has a larger size than an indexed PNG image. PNG gives a much wider range of transparency options than GIF, including alpha