4 ms·

User experience. Gifs/apng load and play instantly* and loop. There is no play button to click. No volume button, sliders, etc. One simple link. Instant load

by mdeeks 10y ago

User experience. Gifs/apng load and play instantly* and loop. There is no play button to click. No volume button, sliders, etc. One simple link. Instant load and play. *assuming good bandwidth

pvg 10y ago
The user experience is miserable. They take longer to start, impossible to stop, burn bandwidth and CPU. Scroll through something like kotaku sometimes, it's an utter poopfest.
- j3097736 10y ago
  Try replacing those with videos and stand back as the CPU fan spools up at full power.
  - pvg 10y ago
    With non-flash videos? Hasn't been my experience under OS X, at least. Tiny gifv videos just play. 1080p, 60p video doesn't turn on the fans.
    - j3097736 10y ago
      That's not a fair comparison with gif/apng if the thing can pick between webm or mp4 to get hardware acceleration and start/stop off-screen videos.
      - pvg 10y ago
        Why is it not a fair comparison? A page full of gifs in a browser gobbles bandwidth, can't be interrupted, eats lots of cpu. A page full of gifvs doesn't have any of these problems. One of these is a lousy user experience, the other one is not. I don't have to make both of these things a shitty user experience just so the comparison is 'fair'.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      A dozen imgur tabs with a single gifv each have caused me notable background CPU use in Firefox. A dozen tabs with gifs in them don't.
      - pvg 10y ago
        That doesn't really count. A dozen tabs in Firefox might also give you a rash, the solution is to probably stop using Firefox not to convert videos to gifs.
- ecnahc515 10y ago
  All true, but those aren't necessarily problems with the concept of a gif, and could be fixed with another format, that isn't necessarily a full on video. I think the concept of gif's is fairly great, but the actual format itself has tons of issues.
  - pvg 10y ago
    It seems to be covered adequately by formats supported by current browsers. Try pasting a link to a gif in Facebook. Facebook will convert it to an mp4 and put a big 'GIF' button on top of it. This doesn't seem to bother or be noticed by (statistically) anybody.
- mdeeks 10y ago
  Every single gif on that page loaded instantly for me. Chrome inspector says it took 300ms to load this gif: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--6Z2c_2KU--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/qi4ffj6cgmnoxagtxhex.gif https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--6Z2c_2K... When I paste that in an incognito window it displays and plays instantly.
  - pvg 10y ago
    300ms is a good target for a page load, not for a pointless animation. And that's a 3MB gif. The page also contains a 2.6MB one, two 6+MB ones and one over 7MB. The entire page is over 30MB. Scrolling through it takes the sort of bandwidth typically used for a high quality streaming movie. At 1 to 2 MB/sec you can easily miss something is an animation in the first place because it won't have time to load. Of course, you're not really missing anything other than a low-fps repeated distraction you can't choose to start or stop. This is a good user experience the way a fresh pile of manure is warm shelter.
untog 10y ago
An autoplaying, looping, silent video with no controls is possible in a web browser with a <video> tag and a few attributes, though.
minitech 10y ago
User experience is worse with GIF. It takes more bandwidth and consumes more CPU time than a comparable video in cases where video is applicable (and when the other cases occasionally pop up, lossless WebP is probably still a better choice). HTML5 video can be set to autoplay and loop and doesn’t have controls by default: <video autoplay loop src="…"></video>

by mdeeks 10y ago

User experience. Gifs/apng load and play instantly* and loop. There is no play button to click. No volume button, sliders, etc. One simple link. Instant load and play. *assuming good bandwidth

pvg 10y ago

The user experience is miserable. They take longer to start, impossible to stop, burn bandwidth and CPU. Scroll through something like kotaku sometimes, it's an utter poopfest.

j3097736 10y ago
Try replacing those with videos and stand back as the CPU fan spools up at full power.
- pvg 10y ago
  With non-flash videos? Hasn't been my experience under OS X, at least. Tiny gifv videos just play. 1080p, 60p video doesn't turn on the fans.
  - j3097736 10y ago
    That's not a fair comparison with gif/apng if the thing can pick between webm or mp4 to get hardware acceleration and start/stop off-screen videos.
    - pvg 10y ago
      Why is it not a fair comparison? A page full of gifs in a browser gobbles bandwidth, can't be interrupted, eats lots of cpu. A page full of gifvs doesn't have any of these problems. One of these is a lousy user experience, the other one is not. I don't have to make both of these things a shitty user experience just so the comparison is 'fair'.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    A dozen imgur tabs with a single gifv each have caused me notable background CPU use in Firefox. A dozen tabs with gifs in them don't.
    - pvg 10y ago
      That doesn't really count. A dozen tabs in Firefox might also give you a rash, the solution is to probably stop using Firefox not to convert videos to gifs.
ecnahc515 10y ago
All true, but those aren't necessarily problems with the concept of a gif, and could be fixed with another format, that isn't necessarily a full on video. I think the concept of gif's is fairly great, but the actual format itself has tons of issues.
- pvg 10y ago
  It seems to be covered adequately by formats supported by current browsers. Try pasting a link to a gif in Facebook. Facebook will convert it to an mp4 and put a big 'GIF' button on top of it. This doesn't seem to bother or be noticed by (statistically) anybody.
mdeeks 10y ago
Every single gif on that page loaded instantly for me. Chrome inspector says it took 300ms to load this gif: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--6Z2c_2KU--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/qi4ffj6cgmnoxagtxhex.gif https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--6Z2c_2K... When I paste that in an incognito window it displays and plays instantly.
- pvg 10y ago
  300ms is a good target for a page load, not for a pointless animation. And that's a 3MB gif. The page also contains a 2.6MB one, two 6+MB ones and one over 7MB. The entire page is over 30MB. Scrolling through it takes the sort of bandwidth typically used for a high quality streaming movie. At 1 to 2 MB/sec you can easily miss something is an animation in the first place because it won't have time to load. Of course, you're not really missing anything other than a low-fps repeated distraction you can't choose to start or stop. This is a good user experience the way a fresh pile of manure is warm shelter.

untog 10y ago

An autoplaying, looping, silent video with no controls is possible in a web browser with a <video> tag and a few attributes, though.

minitech 10y ago

User experience is worse with GIF. It takes more bandwidth and consumes more CPU time than a comparable video in cases where video is applicable (and when the other cases occasionally pop up, lossless WebP is probably still a better choice). HTML5 video can be set to autoplay and loop and doesn’t have controls by default: <video autoplay loop src="…"></video>