[zeugma]

TIFF is a very versatile container format for various image-streams. It can encode multi-images(likes layers), with different compression (losseless, JPEG etc) and tiled images to read/write efficiently big images e.g. for astronomy, pathology (microscopy). It is the standard for archiving images.

[Aardwolf]

Ok... my browser in Linux didn't handle them well and didn't even suggest a program to open them with.

How well does Windows handle them?

Does one really want to save an image to disk first to be able to view it? Would imgur have been a success if all their images were in TIFF?

[thaumasiotes]

First, this is obviously a problem with the browser ("I can't view a common image standard!"), not the image format (it may have other problems, but "third party software isn't supporting this format" isn't a real problem).

Second, assuming your goal is to study the picture, of course you want to save it to disk.