Windows Bitmap

BMP File Format as been widely used on Windows platform. Although it supports data compression and alpha channels, these features were not widely used as it was not supported by all image editors.

See the reference side-by-side comparison Common image file formats

	BMP
Pros
Cons	Large file size
Features
Lossless	Yes
Animation support	No
Transparency support	Yes
Licensed	No
Layers support	No
Developed by	Microsoft
Commonly used for
Browser support (without plugin)
Internet Explorer	No
Firefox	No
Opera	No
Safari	No
Google Chrome	No
Additional
File extensions	.bmp .dib
Wikipedia	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format