PNGs – Who’s got it right?

While slicing up my website, I found that saving certain graphics (the ones with gradients of course) as PNGs preserved the quality much better and at a lower size than using GIF - Exact. Jpegs were out because text was involved and the size needed to get rid of the artifacting was prohibitive. So PNGs were in. I haven't had much problem with the PNG format in the past; if anything, it offers some amazing benefits over the other formats. Transparency being the first that pops into mind, except for the fact that it appears opaque in Win IE. But even that is still usable as long as one accounts for that behavior.

But for the first time I noticed something interesting while marking up my page and testing it in Safari. The PNG graphics displayed the color differently from adjacent GIFs. I decided to accomodate for this and changed my GIFs to match this new shade, figuring that the PNG was simply "truer" to the real color. But then I loaded the page in Firefox and found that the new GIFs were darker than the PNGs - the original GIFs and PNGs matched perfectly in this browser. A quick test of Win IE revealed that it acted just like Firefox in this matter. So, apparently this PNG rendering issue is unique to Safari.

The question then is, who's got it right? For the time being, I'm assuming Firefox (and I suppose Win IE by association, though I refuse to say it outright) but I use Safari predominantly so I have to live with my site looking a little "off."

I may end up resorting to using GIFs again, but I hate giving in, especially when it means compromising on quality.