Exciting news have been coming up this week. Responsive Images are finally being implemented. Chrome is offering <picture> in version 37 behind flags, which means it’s in Canary since this week and hopefully in released stable v37 in August, 2014. Firefox has all the patches nearly finished and will ship soon in Nightly channel.

Long awaited, discussed over the past three years, a webstandard for responsive images will be usable in new browsers by mid of the year. The <picture> element and srcset, sizes will be the thing to use when you need to serve images in different sizes and resolutions.

The Future

With Chrome (therefore Opera) and Firefox supporting Responsive Images two major browser vendors support the webstandard. But still, two other big players are still missing: WebKit (Safari) and Internet Explorer.

WebKit / Safari

The RICG recently crowd-funded the implementation for Blink and WebKit. That means, Yoav Weiss has not only put massive work into the Blink implementation but has already started porting the codebase to WebKit, too. Hopefully, WebKit will approve the patch and therefore get Responsive Images as well.

Internet Explorer

FThe Internet Explorer team officially can’t say anything specific, but at least has both, <picture> and srcset ‘under consideration’ which is a good sign. Also, if three of the four big players will support it, they will likely follow up soon.

After three years of much trouble, many discussion and frustration this makes me very excited! Thanks to all the people supporting me, RICG and other people helping us making this dream become true.

Learn more

• Chris Coyier’s Screencast: Figuring out Responsive Images
• Martin Wolf’s blog post: The new srcset and sizes explained
• The whole picture about <picture> and srcset and everything else by the Responsive Images Community Group