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In the article Battilana is quoted as saying: "Even browsers today don't have a good alternative to GIF unless you want a very sophisticated and still patent-co

In the article Battilana is quoted as saying: "Even browsers today don't have a good alternative to GIF unless you want a very sophisticated and still patent-covered video like MPEG-2 or MPEG-4." But we have WebM, works on Chrome, Firefox, Opera and on IE with components https://www.webmproject.org/ie/ https://www.webmproject.org/ie/ - is that not good enough? No mention of the Animated extention to PNG, which Firefox, Safari and Opera do support. Chrome has an add-on for it but I don't know about IE. You wonder if the image is smaller when it's a silent video or when it's a APNG, probably it's the same with animated GIF, the movie format is more efficient then the animated image format. Perhaps someone can make a proxy plugin that converts all animated gifs on the fly to webm and all gifs to png. You never have to see these GIFs again, another SaaS subscription model

mjevans 10y ago
It isn't. It has to work on 99.99% of things. People have to actually feel /shocked/ that it doesn't work on a platform for it to be a sufficient replacement.
- byuu 10y ago
  Yeah, exactly. Apparently mobile Safari is the only browser that refuses to support :hover CSS menus, and even though that's maybe 0.1% of my site's traffic, it almost concerns me enough to implement some elaborate workaround. Almost. Anyone that was running a business would not be able to write off a browser as I have. Hell, I still have a Javascript hack for IE8 to support HTML5 tags. Saying, "go fetch these browser plugins to view this page" or lose IE users is an absolute non-starter, unfortunately.
  - guptaneil 10y ago
    I downvoted you and started scrolling away, but then figured it was rude to not give you an explanation, so here it goes... I downvoted you because your comment is difficult to follow. My best interpretation is that you dislike iOS Safari because it doesn't support a specific CSS feature (one that makes little sense on a touch device), but you don't care enough about iOS to find a workaround. However, you do care about IE8 (a browser that was released 7 years ago) enough for it to be a non-starter to ignore it as well. That's an interesting business decision, but to each their own. Regardless, none of your comment seems relevant to the ongoing discussion of replacing gif with webm and the difficulty of finding a universal format. tl;dr ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - cr3ative 10y ago
    How would you implement :hover on a touch screen?
    - byuu 10y ago
      The same way mobile Chrome and mobile Firefox do it: you tap the menu item and the :hover dropdown appears and stays there. Tap outside of the box to make it go away.
vanderZwan 10y ago
I just hope they all jump on the FLIF bandwagon when that format stabilises. Lossless animations are pretty neat for smaller stuff.
- hrjet 10y ago
  Although FLIF, the format, is lossless, the FLIF encoder has an option to lossily encode the input. It works by eliminating the differences between the predicted pixel and the actual pixel. When encoded lossily, FLIF is competent with JPEG on still images, and ofcourse very competetent with GIFs.
wodenokoto 10y ago
One of animated gif's strengths are the promise of being silent. When users see GIF, they have the promise of a bite size animation, that loops and is silent. It is very hard to teach users a new name for that. webm doesn't promise to be silent, which is why we are seeing this gifv container format, which does promise to be silent. You need out-of-box support by Safari and Chrome to cover enough users. Preferably IE in the mix. This is why all the big gif sites use both gif and gifv.
- hrjet 10y ago
  FLIF promises to be silent as well. It also has a ~50KB JS decoder [1]. [1] https://uprootlabs.github.io/poly-flif/polyflif-sample.html
- Springtime 10y ago
  > When users see GIF, they have the promise of a bite size animation This isn't always true. Many, many GIFs I see around now are longer, if not full length clips and/or at obscenely un-optimized resolutions/sizes. Due to the ease of video to GIF conversion tools like Imgur, etc users have no reason not to clip longer and larger potions of videos for GIF conversion. > webm doesn't promise to be silent This isn't really such a problem with a change of a browser preference or use an addon. Part of this is also the responsibility of the site to auto mute if it offers embedding for that purpose. At some point though there needs to be more user awareness and push for the better alternatives all around so the experience doesn't devolve further into posting 10-100MB GIFs of video clips (I see this on a daily basis) just because Imgur or GfyCat spat it out and their posting platform only encourages/supports raw GIFs. There also needs to be more hosts that allow direct video clip uploads to support this. Edit: brevity.
  - wodenokoto 10y ago
    > Many, many GIFs I see around now are longer, if not full length clips and/or at obscenely un-optimized resolutions/sizes Which is why I wrote that the length promise can be broken. > This isn't really such a problem with a change of a browser preference or use an Haddon. Yes, it is such a problem. If you promise the user that the clip is silent, you also promise the user that it can be consumed in silence. Yes you can click a youtube link while keeping your computer on silence, but guess what, chances are the video is made for consumption with audio. > and their posting platform only encourages/supports raw GIFs. All the gif purveyors support webm. It is typically called gifv, because users recognise the gif word and believe all the promises I mentioned. But there isn't an alternative as ubiquitous as animated GIF.
keeperofdakeys 10y ago
There are actually two animated PNG formats. APNG, a simpler format that was rejected by the PNG working group (supported in Firefox and Safari). And MNG, a more complex format that's an official spec from the PNG working group (formerly supported by Konkerer). With <video> becoming so widespread, the future for both these formats seems bleak.
CamperBob2 10y ago
No mention of the Animated extention to PNG, which Firefox, Safari and Opera do support. You have to wonder what the PNG standard authors were thinking, not including animation from day 1. This is what happens when you propose a new standard that purports to replace an existing one, and then doesn't.
the8472 10y ago
I don't think all browsers support 4:4:4 vp9 webm with alpha, so so the lowest common denominator is chroma subsampling and no transparency, which is bad for pixel art.
JadeNB 10y ago
> No mention of the Animated extention to PNG, which Firefox, Safari and Opera do support. If I understand correctly what you mean, the article does mention it, albeit somewhat dismissively: > It wasn't until 2001 that the PNG group's animated GIF-killer-that-couldn't, MNG, emerged to find a web that had finally resigned itself to the GIF.

mjevans 10y ago

It isn't. It has to work on 99.99% of things. People have to actually feel /shocked/ that it doesn't work on a platform for it to be a sufficient replacement.

byuu 10y ago
Yeah, exactly. Apparently mobile Safari is the only browser that refuses to support :hover CSS menus, and even though that's maybe 0.1% of my site's traffic, it almost concerns me enough to implement some elaborate workaround. Almost. Anyone that was running a business would not be able to write off a browser as I have. Hell, I still have a Javascript hack for IE8 to support HTML5 tags. Saying, "go fetch these browser plugins to view this page" or lose IE users is an absolute non-starter, unfortunately.
- guptaneil 10y ago
  I downvoted you and started scrolling away, but then figured it was rude to not give you an explanation, so here it goes... I downvoted you because your comment is difficult to follow. My best interpretation is that you dislike iOS Safari because it doesn't support a specific CSS feature (one that makes little sense on a touch device), but you don't care enough about iOS to find a workaround. However, you do care about IE8 (a browser that was released 7 years ago) enough for it to be a non-starter to ignore it as well. That's an interesting business decision, but to each their own. Regardless, none of your comment seems relevant to the ongoing discussion of replacing gif with webm and the difficulty of finding a universal format. tl;dr ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- cr3ative 10y ago
  How would you implement :hover on a touch screen?
  - byuu 10y ago
    The same way mobile Chrome and mobile Firefox do it: you tap the menu item and the :hover dropdown appears and stays there. Tap outside of the box to make it go away.

vanderZwan 10y ago

I just hope they all jump on the FLIF bandwagon when that format stabilises. Lossless animations are pretty neat for smaller stuff.

hrjet 10y ago
Although FLIF, the format, is lossless, the FLIF encoder has an option to lossily encode the input. It works by eliminating the differences between the predicted pixel and the actual pixel. When encoded lossily, FLIF is competent with JPEG on still images, and ofcourse very competetent with GIFs.

wodenokoto 10y ago

One of animated gif's strengths are the promise of being silent. When users see GIF, they have the promise of a bite size animation, that loops and is silent. It is very hard to teach users a new name for that. webm doesn't promise to be silent, which is why we are seeing this gifv container format, which does promise to be silent. You need out-of-box support by Safari and Chrome to cover enough users. Preferably IE in the mix. This is why all the big gif sites use both gif and gifv.

hrjet 10y ago
FLIF promises to be silent as well. It also has a ~50KB JS decoder [1]. [1] https://uprootlabs.github.io/poly-flif/polyflif-sample.html
Springtime 10y ago
> When users see GIF, they have the promise of a bite size animation This isn't always true. Many, many GIFs I see around now are longer, if not full length clips and/or at obscenely un-optimized resolutions/sizes. Due to the ease of video to GIF conversion tools like Imgur, etc users have no reason not to clip longer and larger potions of videos for GIF conversion. > webm doesn't promise to be silent This isn't really such a problem with a change of a browser preference or use an addon. Part of this is also the responsibility of the site to auto mute if it offers embedding for that purpose. At some point though there needs to be more user awareness and push for the better alternatives all around so the experience doesn't devolve further into posting 10-100MB GIFs of video clips (I see this on a daily basis) just because Imgur or GfyCat spat it out and their posting platform only encourages/supports raw GIFs. There also needs to be more hosts that allow direct video clip uploads to support this. Edit: brevity.
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  > Many, many GIFs I see around now are longer, if not full length clips and/or at obscenely un-optimized resolutions/sizes Which is why I wrote that the length promise can be broken. > This isn't really such a problem with a change of a browser preference or use an Haddon. Yes, it is such a problem. If you promise the user that the clip is silent, you also promise the user that it can be consumed in silence. Yes you can click a youtube link while keeping your computer on silence, but guess what, chances are the video is made for consumption with audio. > and their posting platform only encourages/supports raw GIFs. All the gif purveyors support webm. It is typically called gifv, because users recognise the gif word and believe all the promises I mentioned. But there isn't an alternative as ubiquitous as animated GIF.

keeperofdakeys 10y ago

There are actually two animated PNG formats. APNG, a simpler format that was rejected by the PNG working group (supported in Firefox and Safari). And MNG, a more complex format that's an official spec from the PNG working group (formerly supported by Konkerer). With <video> becoming so widespread, the future for both these formats seems bleak.

CamperBob2 10y ago

No mention of the Animated extention to PNG, which Firefox, Safari and Opera do support. You have to wonder what the PNG standard authors were thinking, not including animation from day 1. This is what happens when you propose a new standard that purports to replace an existing one, and then doesn't.

the8472 10y ago

I don't think all browsers support 4:4:4 vp9 webm with alpha, so so the lowest common denominator is chroma subsampling and no transparency, which is bad for pixel art.

JadeNB 10y ago

> No mention of the Animated extention to PNG, which Firefox, Safari and Opera do support. If I understand correctly what you mean, the article does mention it, albeit somewhat dismissively: > It wasn't until 2001 that the PNG group's animated GIF-killer-that-couldn't, MNG, emerged to find a web that had finally resigned itself to the GIF.