Wider adoption of FLIF

No matter how advanced a new file format is, it won’t be accepted by a wider audience until industry-standard applications support it natively. Talking about FLIF, things are going quite well because we can already encode and decode *.flif files using ImageMagick (commands like and are part of it). We can’t guarantee that your current ImageMagick installation can handle FLIF right now, because many Linux vendors still consider FLIF an experimental format and don’t include some extra compilation flags when building their ImageMagick packages. But of course, it’s not that difficult to build your own copy of ImageMagick into Linux.

Another big win could be an inclusion of FLIF support into the main tree of the Chromium web browser. Chromium is the world’s most popular base technology for dozens of re-branded derivatives worldwide (if you can cope with compiling the huge bundle of Chromium sources, then you can roll out your own homemade browser!).

For now, FLIF isn’t a part of Chromium because it still needs to mature. On the other hand, Google promotes its own WebP format, which is a direct competitor of FLIF. In most tests, FLIF outperforms WebP by a noticeable margin, but the difference isn’t applicable when it comes to the use of graphics on the Internet.