What image file formats are supported by browsers?

Question

JPEG, GIF and PNG can be displayed with the img tag and will work in all browsers, an element of the object can be used to display images indicating its MIME type, but what other image formats are supported by img or object tags in most browsers without installing plugins? (TIF, SVG, PCX, PICT, etc.)

Answer 1

There's a great diagram on wikipedia that lists common image types and their browser support.

The file types you specified (jpg, gif, and png) are apparently the main formats supported by almost every browser, albeit with some caveats:

Internet Explorer supports PNG images, but cannot display images with gamma correction or color correction correctly. Versions of Internet Explorer prior to version 7 cannot correctly display images with an alpha channel (for transparency) without additional encoding

Answer 2

BMP will work the most.

But to surf the web, you should probably stick to the three listed in your question.

Answer 3

Until 2006, IE did not properly deal with PNG that used the alpha channel, while Firefox and other (almost) standards that match browsers. There is still a lot of IE 6 there, judging by my apache logs.