What image formats do the major browsers support? (2012)

Question

I was wondering what image formats (aside from the basic JPEG, GIF, PNG) the major browsers would support, especially Chrome, Firefox, and Webkit. If anyone can provide a link to a list somewhere (that is updated frequently to cope with the frequent updates recently) that would be great. Support for other formats (like document and video) would also be nice.

I feel like this information should be listed somewhere, but I didn't find any such thing when I searched.

Answer 1

Here is a nice resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Image_format_support

Answer 2

Major image file support

.bmp, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif

New

.webp

Answer 3

The image format supported in popular browsers: BMP, SVG, JPG, PNG and GIF. There is no two format jpeg or jpg, it's one with multiple extensions used due to see here.

Note: SVG(Simple Vector Graphics) can produced much smaller images but allows only vector images(no raster).

Next, the other formats used are webp and jpeg2000.

Webp:- Supported by many browsers such as Chrome, Opera. There is an issue running for Firefox support here. Note that, Webp can reduce the image memory size to around 30-40% of the original size(in our experiments) on an average. This doesn't means always as sometimes we have seen transcoded webp from jpegs to go beyond the original jpeg size. The output image had no visual difference compared to original jpegs. My suggestion: serve webp where possible, i.e. Chrome, Android, Opera.

JPEG2000:- This format is great. Resizing an image does not drop quality as much as JPEG. The problem is it's too computation intensive for decoding and the fact it came over a decade ago when hardware wasn't great(especially not meant for mobile). It still is used in some cameras as it results in smaller images.

Less popular but worth mentioning: BPG and FLIF. This will require using JS or other library to serve on web/app.

Answer 4

JPEG and PNG are supported by the every browser. But the new image format which is webP is only supported by the Chrome, and partially by the Firefox and not at all supported by the Safari at all. Thou WebP is really good as it does not compromise with the quality of the image and also reduce it to 25-35% less. But we cant still use it because it is less flexible in the different browser environment. But you can look for the other image format also which are available and compatible for each browser type.