How widely are PNG images used?

[Storyman]

A couple of years ago I started to use PNG images, but soon discovered that a fair number of visitors could not view them. Have things changed? Do all of the popular browsers currently support PNG?

What are the pitfalls with using PNG?

[Demaestro]

PNG should work fine expect for Alpha channels (read, transparency) in Internet Explorer.

Also animated type things seem to be buggy in a lot of browsers and their versions.

It is too bad too because I would love to see PNG replace stupid GIF for animated images.

You may want to read this page. It is summarizes Browsers with PNG Support:

[libpng.org...]

[Ardfry Imaging]

IE doesn't do a good job w/ transparency. This has been fixed in IE7.
The following is a link to the blog post by the developer at Microsoft who implemented PNG transparency support in IE7.

[blogs.msdn.com...]