[Admins]

We said it 2 years ago or so, didn't know the thing is going to be free soon. The legallity of supporting gifs was not clear, Unisys only charged the producers of programs that could write gifs. png and mngs are better than gif because they use better compression and allow more options, like mngs can contain jpegs or be 24bit. A problem is that many programs don't support them correctly, Adobe even had problems with png.
The gif format formerly referenced as 'compuserve interchange format' because it was the image format used in the compuserve network, later when it was becoming famous in the internet someone got the idea to charge fees for using it and bought the patents.