Free webp to jpg
EN
Image MIME Reference
BMP

Windows Bitmap (Legacy Windows MIME Alias)

image/x-windows-bmp
VS

Free Lossless Image Format

image/flif
FLIF

A complete technical comparison of Windows Bitmap (Legacy Windows MIME Alias) and Free Lossless Image Format — covering compression, feature support, browser compatibility, magic bytes, and when to choose each format.

BMP wins on browser support

Feature Support

Feature BMP FLIF
Transparency (Alpha) Yes Yes
Animation Support ✕ No Yes
Progressive Loading ✕ No Yes
HDR Support ✕ No Yes
EXIF Metadata ✕ No Yes
ICC Color Profile Yes Yes
Windows Bitmap (Legacy Windows MIME Alias)
image/x-windows-bmp
Extension
.bmp.dib
Container DIB (Device-Independent Bitmap)
Compression Uncompressed / Run-Length Encoding (RLE)
Algorithm
NoneRLE4RLE8
Color Depth 1-bit (Monochrome), 4-bit (16 colors), 8-bit (256 colors), 16-bit (High Color), 24-bit (True Color), 32-bit (True Color with Alpha)
Developed by Microsoft Corporation
Released 1985
Magic Bytes
42 4D
Full BMP reference →
Free Lossless Image Format
image/flif
Extension
.flif
Container FLIF Bitstream
Compression Lossless (MANIAC Entropy Coding)
Algorithm
MANIAC (Meta-Adaptive Near-zero Integer Arithmetic Coding)
Color Depth 1-bit to 16-bit (Per Channel), Grayscale, RGB, RGBA, CMYK
Developed by Jon Sneyers and Pieter Wuille (Cloudinary)
Released 2015
Magic Bytes
46 4C 49 46
Full FLIF reference →

Browser Support Comparison

Browser BMP FLIF
Chrome Chrome
✓ 1
 ✕
Firefox Firefox
✓ 1
 ✕
Safari Safari
✓ 1
 ✕
Edge Edge
✓ 12
 ✕
IE IE (Legacy)
✓
 ✕
BMP

BMP Strengths

  • Universally supported by all major operating systems and modern web browsers
  • Maintains perfect, lossless fidelity because pixel data is stored without lossy compression artifacts
Limitations
  • Massive file size overhead due to a lack of modern compression algorithms
  • Legacy MIME strings like 'image/x-windows-bmp' can trigger validation warnings in strict security or API environments if unhandled
FLIF

FLIF Strengths

  • Achieves some of the highest lossless compression ratios ever developed for raster images
  • Incredible progressive decoding allows an image to be highly recognizable even after only 5% of the file has been downloaded
  • Supports animations and complex alpha channels losslessly
Limitations
  • Officially abandoned in favor of JPEG XL
  • Zero native support in web browsers or standard operating system previewers
  • Encoding speed can be significantly slower than standard PNG or WebP compression

When to choose which format

BMP
Use BMP when…
  • Legacy Windows Desktop Registry Associations
  • Older Enterprise Intranet Applications
  • Windows Graphics Archival
FLIF
Use FLIF when…
  • Archival of Uncompressed Image Assets
  • Bandwidth-Constrained Progressive Image Loading (Historical)
  • Medical and Scientific Imaging Storage

More comparisons

BMP vs ACES → FLIF vs ACES → BMP vs APNG → FLIF vs APNG → BMP vs AVCI → FLIF vs AVCI → BMP vs AVCS → FLIF vs AVCS → BMP vs AVIF → FLIF vs AVIF → All comparisons →
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