Ultimate Crapola (FUBAR): PNG on Internet Explorer 7 Hell

Well, as much as I love Microsoft - I'm known as the "MS drone" among peers, and live and breath Microsoft for my development work (desktop and web), I must say that this PNG-thing with Internet Explorer is utter crapola.

A short background: Prior to concentrating on "back end" stuff (aka server-side) for web work, I did a lot of design. Makes sense since I've been into this since the mid-1990s (old dog) - days when the most "interactivity" you could get from the web was email, html FORMs were unheard of, and html TABLE was still a "spec". I started shifting more into real development work sometime in 1999. I say this because I have to admit that I've not been into the UI side of things - so while I've heard of the PNG "issue" for some time - I never really bothered. Until IE 7 that is.

A lot of talk (even fanfare...I don't know why) came up about IE 7's support for transparent PNGs (alpha or index), so I thought maybe it was time to embrace this PNG thing and think about replacing some GIFs and JPEGs where it would make sense (or not, fun stuff if you will).

Well, after a few quick tests, I have to say that PNG is great, Internet Explorer's support of it is just FUBAR, Firefox support is awesome, and yes, even the newer Safari (beta at that!) on Windows has excellent PNG support.

In 2 short days of research, Internet Explorer 7 has a host of issues with PNG. The usual finger pointing exists, but the simple fact that they do exist is an issue in and of itself. Why IE is the **only** one affected, when Firefox, and (gulp!) the BETA version of Safari on Windows aren't speaks volumes to the issue. Here's a sampling:

• Quicktime, PNG and IE 7 issues discussed here
  
  
• Pointless "hotfix" (for PNG???) for IE 6 here
  Why pointless? Show me someone who will actually muck around registry settings just to see PNG on the web, and we've discovered yet another fool
  
  
• Some UAC issues on VISTA that affect PNG display, links of which I won't post since they somehow contain instructions that to me are just as pointless as the "hotfix". Why risk your system to view PNGs???
  
  
• My personal pain - Security software that either does more than it should or yet another example of poorly designed security software. In my case its McAfee.
  
  
• To those interested, and are going through Internet Explorer 7 PNG hell, and have McAfee installed, you can do this simple test (Windows XP):
  
  
1. Go to the web site with the PNG issue using IE 7
   
2. Click on Start, the RUN and type "services.mcs", this just opens up the Windows Services MMC console
3. You'll see a list of McAfee services running
4. Select McAfee Redirector and STOP it (right click), don't close MMC yet
5. Go back to IE 7 and refresh the page. Just for good measure, close IE7 and restart, and go to all the web sites that you've had issues with transparent PNGs. Issue should be gone
6. Call McAfee and discuss this with them since you'll want to re-Start the McAfee Redirector Service ...(right click, START)
   

So there. It really doesn't matter who's at fault. It's turning into a pointless quest for a less than valuable answer to the task at hand. The question really needed answering was "Is it time for PNG"? and not, "what's wrong with it"?

So is it time for PNG? I have my answer: it's a resounding NO.

Not with all the possible configurations of PCs out there. And no matter what "religion" you have with browsers, Internet Explorer dominates the landscape. If such a simple and trivial thing like installing QuickTime (everybody has iTunes right?), or security software (anti-x), and UAC on VISTA, is enough to effectively kill Internet Explorer's PNG support, then it doesn't matter who needs to go back to the drawing board - I don't care. The question has been answered - stick to GIFs and JPEGs for the foreseeable future.

And yes, note to my beloved Microsoft: You've got serious work to do. It's laughable that a BETA browser, Safari on Windows, has absolutely no issues, no matter what configuration is involved, for such a trivial thing as full PNG support.