The History of Web Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG, SVG, WebP & AVIF

1. The internet before modern image formats

Picture a 14.4 kbps modem. A single uncompressed colour photograph, the kind your phone now produces without a second thought, would have taken minutes to transfer.

Early computer displays were themselves limited to a small number of colours, so there was little reason to send enormous quantities of image data anyway.

What the web needed wasn't better images. It needed smaller ones: formats built around the assumption that every byte had to justify its trip down the wire.

2. The GIF patent war

In 1987, CompuServe released the Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, as a compact way to move colour images through its dial-up file libraries.

GIF relied on LZW compression, which could dramatically reduce the size of repetitive image data. It spread rapidly and became one of the defining image formats of the early web.

There was just one problem: LZW was patented.

The patent belonged to Sperry Corporation, later absorbed into Unisys. In December 1994, Unisys announced that it would seek royalties from software developers using the patented compression technology.

The reaction was immediate. A format that had effectively become a shared language of the early internet suddenly had a legal ownership problem attached to it.

The response was PNG, developed as a patent-free alternative to GIF. Its specification retained useful GIF features while adding truecolour support, stronger transparency capabilities and better technical foundations.

GIF survived anyway. Its patent problems eventually disappeared, and animation became one of the format's defining cultural uses. PNG had better foundations for many static graphics, but GIF had accidentally become a cultural institution.

3. JPEG takes photography

GIF and PNG were excellent for graphics. Photography was another problem entirely.

JPEG, standardised in the early 1990s, made a fundamentally different trade. It accepted that some image information could be discarded if a human observer was unlikely to notice the difference.

Photographs contain enormous amounts of gradual colour variation, texture and fine detail. JPEG can remove much of that information while preserving the structures and contrasts that matter most perceptually.

That made JPEG extraordinarily effective for photographs and comparatively poor for things such as sharp text, diagrams and simple graphics.

4. PNG quietly conquers graphics

Once browser support improved and the patent controversy faded, PNG settled into the role it still occupies today.

Logos, screenshots, diagrams, interface elements and graphics requiring transparency all benefited from PNG's lossless design and alpha channel.

It wasn't glamorous. There was no enormous corporate campaign. PNG simply did the un-photographic parts of the web's visual job extremely well.

5. The web gets fat

By the 2000s and 2010s, the original problem had inverted. Bandwidth was no longer as scarce, but websites had absorbed almost all of the extra capacity and then demanded more.

High-resolution photography, Retina displays and image-heavy design made pages increasingly large. Images became one of the biggest categories of bytes a browser had to download.

Mobile made the problem particularly obvious. A page that loaded comfortably over broadband could become painfully slow on a congested cellular connection.

Image compression had stopped being a technical curiosity. It was now a performance problem with an economic consequence.

6. Google declares war on JPEG

In 2010, Google introduced WebP, using technology derived from the VP8 video codec acquired through its purchase of On2 Technologies.

The idea was straightforward: create a modern image format capable of producing smaller files than JPEG and PNG while retaining useful image quality and supporting transparency.

Technically, the case for WebP was strong. The harder problem was convincing an entire ecosystem to change.

7. Why WebP took so long

Compression algorithms don't control the web. Browsers do, and so do content-management systems, image editors, CDNs and millions of existing files.

Chrome adopted WebP early. Other browsers took much longer. Safari did not gain WebP support until 2020.

Developers therefore had to maintain fallbacks: serve WebP to browsers that supported it and JPEG or PNG to everything else.

Once support became effectively universal, the economic argument became much stronger. But the decade-long delay demonstrated an important principle:

8. SVG comes out of nowhere

SVG followed a completely different path.

Scalable Vector Graphics became a W3C Recommendation in 2001. Unlike the raster formats in this story, SVG does not primarily store pixels. It stores mathematical descriptions of shapes, paths and curves.

That means an SVG logo can be rendered at 20 pixels wide or across a 4K display without requiring a different source image for each size.

For years this was useful but not revolutionary. Then the web changed.

High-DPI displays made low-resolution raster graphics look terrible. Responsive design meant interfaces had to work across wildly different screen sizes. Flat design produced enormous numbers of icons, logos and simple illustrations.

SVG suddenly solved several problems at once.

SVG's rise wasn't really a victory over JPEG or PNG. It happened because the web developed an entirely new category of image problem.

9. AVIF arrives

By the late 2010s, JPEG was more than 25 years old and WebP had gained substantial but incomplete adoption.

AVIF, the AV1 Image File Format, emerged from the Alliance for Open Media. Instead of inventing an entirely new compression system, AVIF adapted the intra-frame compression technology from AV1.

The result is a format capable of extremely efficient compression while supporting features including HDR, wide colour gamut, transparency and animation.

More sophisticated compression generally means more computation. Encoding can therefore be considerably more expensive than older formats, particularly when images have to be processed in real time.

10. The 2026 landscape

So where did all of these battles leave the web?

W3Techs' current survey shows a web that is still remarkably pluralistic. PNG and JPEG remain dominant, SVG has become enormous, WebP has established a substantial foothold, GIF survives, and AVIF is still comparatively small. The percentages overlap because websites commonly use several formats simultaneously.

W3Techs percentages represent websites using each format and therefore overlap. They should not be added together.

11. The strange conclusion

The last three decades of image formats do not show a neat progression from bad technology to better technology.

If they did, JPEG would have disappeared years ago. Instead, it remains one of the most widely used image formats on the web, more than three decades after its standardisation.

PNG didn't disappear when WebP offered better compression. PNG had a different job: lossless graphics and transparency.

GIF didn't disappear when technically superior formats arrived. Its job narrowed until it became culturally associated with looping animation.

SVG's enormous growth wasn't caused by better photographic compression at all. It happened because the visual language of the web changed.

The real history of image formats

New image formats don't win simply because their compression ratios are better.

They win when the web develops a problem that the existing formats cannot solve particularly well.

GIF solved the bandwidth problem of early graphics. JPEG solved the problem of transmitting photographs. PNG solved the weaknesses of GIF. SVG solved scalable interface graphics. WebP attacked the growing size of modern websites. AVIF pushed compression efficiency even further.

None completely replaced its predecessors.

That may be the strangest part of the entire history. After almost forty years of increasingly sophisticated compression technology, the answer to "what is the best image format?" is still: it depends.

Methodology and sources

Historical dates and technical descriptions were checked against standards and industry sources, including W3C specifications, the Alliance for Open Media's AVIF documentation and W3Techs' image format usage surveys.

Historical adoption figures are necessarily approximate because comprehensive web-wide measurement did not exist for every period. Modern W3Techs figures are updated continuously and should be treated as a snapshot rather than a permanent market-share number.

Explore image conversion

If the history has inspired the entirely reasonable desire to convert one of these formats, FileTools handles the practical part: