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The most important part of GIFs for me is that they behave like images in browsers. They are always auto-playing with no concept of play and pause. You can drag

The most important part of GIFs for me is that they behave like images in browsers. They are always auto-playing with no concept of play and pause. You can drag and drop them from a browser to your desktop to save them. You can save an entire page and have all the image files save with it. I've never had this work for webm or other video formats. You could even argue that GIFs not being a video with no video decoding required is a feature. It may take longer to load, but I can have 100+ GIFs playing at once with no impact to my CPU. I don't care about video compression or hardware decoding or whatever until they function the same way as GIFs do.

masklinn 7y ago
> The most important part of GIFs for me is that they behave like images in browsers. They are always auto-playing with no concept of play and pause. You can drag and drop them from a browser to your desktop to save them. You can save an entire page and have all the image files save with it. I've never had this work for webm or other video formats. The saving bit is the only part which doesn't work right with videos AFAIK. Sound-less (/muted) videos can autoplay and loop, and there's no controls unless you ask for them (via the `controls` attribute) or bring your own. The examples in the article (the scenes are videos) autoplay, loop and don't have control in either Firefox or Safari.
- izzydata 7y ago
  I understand that they can be made to autoplay with no controls, but I don't even want the possibility of them being paused. This way the format has no choice but to behave as expected across everything.
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    There's nothing about allowing play/pause that prevents videos from behaving exactly like gifs. I've seen browsers with play/pause options for gifs, even.
    - lccarrasco 7y ago
      Can you tell me of one, please? I'd like to check their implementation, most play/pausable gifs I see are only converted webms.
    - silversconfused 7y ago
      The stop button used to stop all gifs on a page in firefox and internet explorer. Not sure if that was a bug or a feature though, since the stop button was generally not available when page load finished.
      - silversconfused 7y ago
        (Maybe I remembered wrong, someone else mentioned here that it was ESC, not stop)
        Izkata 7y ago
        At least on Firefox, it was indeed stop. I believe it still works too, even though nowadays they hide the button, if you expose the functionality through an addon.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    > I understand that they can be made to autoplay with no controls, but I don't even want the possibility of them being paused. Your opinions are just that, and usually overridable by the client. The client could even strip your media entirely. And gifs are pausable (used to be ESC though apparently you now need extensions). > This way the format has no choice but to behave as expected across everything. I've got bad news for you: once it reaches the client you're not in control anymore, you can only suggest behaviour.
  - souprock 7y ago
    I don't see why we can't use the IMG tag for video and the VIDEO tag for images. They should be unified, with all the same media formats supported. IMG would autoplay, would not have sound, would loop, and would not have controls. VIDEO would be the opposite. For something like a plain JPG or PNG file, it just shows the one frame. Animated GIF files would of course benefit from the controls. The same should go for unification of the VIDEO and AUDIO tags. Play an audio file as video, and you get a black screen with sound. Play a video file as audio, and you just hear the sound.
    - cflat 7y ago
      Agree. Safari has already made moves for this[1], but Chrome seems to be resistant[2]. [1] https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2017/animated-gif-without-the-gif/ https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2017/animated-gif-without-th... [2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=791658 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=791658
    - mr_toad 7y ago
      > IMG would autoplay, would not have sound, would loop, and would not have controls. Why do you hate my phone battery so much?
      - masklinn 7y ago
        They don't though. At similar quality and framerate, a video is much smaller than a GIF (so the radios can be shut down faster) and requires less power to playback (because it's offloaded to the hardware acceleration instead of being implemented entirely on the CPU). Your average smartphone can play 1080p video without breaking a sweat, not so with 1080p gifs. Hell, a laptop will have permanent high-CPU usage on 1080p gifs, as a video it's background noise (https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/43rrf0/pixel_art_gif_as_desktop_background/czkrhzo/?context=42 https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/43rrf0/pixel_art_gif_a...)
  - Arkanosis 7y ago
    > I don't even want the possibility of them being paused That's downright hostile to the end user… https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/time-limits-pause.html https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/time-limits-pause...
    - silversconfused 7y ago
      A behavior being unchanged for 30 years is hardly user hostile. It's reliable and trustworthy. Like a good tool should be.
      - untog 7y ago
        You used to be able to press the escape button to stop GIFs on the page. It's not unchanged for 30 years.
        silversconfused 7y ago
        Browsers have changed, a lot, in sad and unfortunate ways like you mention here, but the gif format is pretty stable.
      - __jal 7y ago
        Any application that doesn't allow me to stop something from being annoying, will be stopped from being annoying by being uninstalled. If browsers made it such that I couldn't not stop .gif animations (or playing video, or...), I would trash that browser. Bluntly, you do not get to control my computer.
        izzydata 7y ago
        The point is that they are more images than videos. They have no possible way to contain sounds so the annoyingness is limited to having unwanted images in your browser. You can tell your browser to block a particular still image. You can do the same thing to block a GIF. You don't need a pause/play feature on a 2-5 second sequence.
- iainmerrick 7y ago
  I think the saving part is a big deal. There are related problems like embedding. If you upload a video to Slack, say, you can’t control whether it autoplays or loops. If you upload a GIF it just works.
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
Animated gifs are compressed, and do require decoding. Hell, so do non-animated gifs. Since animation was added in the '90s, GIF is basically just a really inefficient (but extremely well-supported) video format. I agree that there won't be wide adoption of AV1s until it can transparently be interacted with just like gifs are now.
- izzydata 7y ago
  That is true. I suppose even jpegs are compressed and require decoding. I'm pretty sure it is orders of magnitude quicker than video decoding though. I can have 500 gifs playing at once just fine, but if I had 500 equivalently sized webm h264 videos playing my computer would have a stroke.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    GIFs are quite expensive to decode, it's all in software and while the encoding is fairly simple the amount of data is huge (especially for high-quality gif in which each frame will be present in full). Gif playback is commonly CPU-bound on the more complex examples.
  - pornel 7y ago
    GIF is super slow to decode, more so than any modern video format! It doesn't seem like it mostly because browsers (slowly) decode GIF as they (slowly) download it, and cache all uncompressed frames in RAM. They don't do the same for <video> tag, because they assume it's only for high-res, non-looping video. • GIF data is huge. 15x-20x times larger for the same dimensions & quality than normal video codecs, and sheer amount of bytes to chew through eclipses any savings from it being slightly simpler. • GIF's compression doesn't support any parallelism. Frames have to be processed bit by bit, frame after frame. Your multi-core CPU can use only a fraction of its speed when decoding. OTOH modern formats support parallelism on all levels - frames, tiles within frames, blocks, transforms. Modern CPUs can process these very effectively. • In modern systems RAM is ridiculously slow relative to computing power available on the CPU locally. However, GIF's LZW is based on lookups in a dynamic dictionary, so not only you have just one CPU core process it, the core mostly spends time chasing pointers. • There's no hardware acceleration for GIF. For newer codecs it's quite common and very power-efficient. There's no technical reason (other than legacy code) stopping browser vendors from treating AV1 just like GIF, with all looping <img> glory. In fact, Safari already supports H.264 in <img>! It's faster in every way.
numlock86 7y ago
> It may take longer to load, but I can have 100+ GIFs playing at once with no impact to my CPU. I remember this myth, saying that the first moon landing required as much computing power (command central, ship etc.) as rendering a GIF. No mention about the resolution, frame speed and so on, though. Hence I think it's a myth. On the other hand you could probably tune those parameters enough to actually make it a true statement ...
- pjc50 7y ago
  GIF is not very CPU-intensive, but I definitely remember systems slow enough that JPEGs loaded at visible speed over a couple of seconds. I also had a Libretto 30 that could play MP3s, but only with the Fraunhofer decoder and not the Winamp one which couldn't quite keep up with realtime.
Causality1 7y ago
Yep. You can include them in any forum or comment post that supports [ img ] tags. That's one reason why it's so infuriating that Google Image search now returns videos along with images because video-gif sites like Giphy look just like actual gifs in the results but you can't embed them.
pjc50 7y ago
Strong agree. Just as HEIF is a video format adapted to be a still image format, the GIF successor should fit in an img tag and be guaranteed not to have sound. Perhaps it could be a different sort of container with the same compressed bitstreams. There is an AV1 "image" format too, which supports "image sequences" but not, oddly, animation.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  GIFs, in pre-AV1 terms, are simply a video with 100% lossless I-frames and autoloop enabled. You can express the “lossless frames” aspect of GIFs today in existing video ways supported by MJPEG, H.264, H.265, or AV1 today. AV1 image sequences are meant for sharing an album of stills, and are not a convenient shortcut for this. Feeding a sequence of frames into `aomenc --lossless=1` should, assuming everything else is working correctly. I believe looping is not currently a property that you can readily set at the codec level, which is perhaps the most critical missing feature of AGIF when considering codecs. Perhaps focusing on the “loop” flag’s presence/absence and whether it’s honored by browsers would most usefully serve the post-GIF world?
  - gsnedders 7y ago
    Would looping not make more sense at a container level, not a codec level?
    - zbobet2012 7y ago
      Far more sense, but containers are a disaster zone in video. Is it av1 in webm, mp4,fragmented mp4/cmaf, or ts? Where does the flag go in each?
      - floatingatoll 7y ago
        And for bonus disaster problems: Should AGIF continue to autoplay when in more efficient other formats it may not?
yoavm 7y ago
> It may take longer to load, but I can have 100+ GIFs playing at once with no impact to my CPU. I don't know what you're talking about really... I was just using Google Slides today and both Firefox and Chrome went to 250% CPU usage, only because there was one slide with a 5 seconds full screen recording GIF. I begged to the person who added it to turn that to a video.
- lotyrin 7y ago
  Yep, browsing pages laden with too many GIFs is my favorite way to have a hot laptop that sounds like it's getting ready to lift off and get my low battery warning to pop up.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  In my experience that's a google slides problem, not a gif problem.
- kkarakk 7y ago
  Google problem not gif problem, sites like knowyourmeme embed 10 gifs in a page routinely with no issues(apart from the loading time)
bluedino 7y ago
>>I can have 100+ GIFs playing at onee with no impact to my CPU It wasn't that long ago that a page full of emoticons (animated gifs) would bring a computer to it's knees (when posting on vbulletin or something)
kec 7y ago
> [...]but I can have 100+ GIFs playing at once with no impact to my CPU. That's... not entirely accurate. What do you think is rendering all those gifs to screen?
- kazinator 7y ago
  The other seven cores that are not being identified as "my CPU".
- izzydata 7y ago
  No "major" impact to the CPU. As insignificant as displaying however many frames exist in the gif as still frame jpegs at the same time.
  - kec 7y ago
    That's still not accurate. Load up 20-30 gifs on a page and I can pretty much guarantee you'll see your browser saturate a core.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      Challenge accepted. https://www.hampsterdance.com/classics/originaldance.htm https://www.hampsterdance.com/classics/originaldance.htm Just did it on my 2011 MacBook Air. Pushes all four cores up... about 15%.
      - a_t48 7y ago
        Do things change if each gif is different?
      - kec 7y ago
        Try again using a gallery page on a site like giphy which is going to be more representative of the use case op was talking about. edit: such as https://giphy.com/sports/2019-stanley-cup-playoffs https://giphy.com/sports/2019-stanley-cup-playoffs which seems to be entirely gifs if you view page resources in the debugger.
Osiris 7y ago
I had to turn off GIFs and animated emoticons in Slack because it was making my fan spin up and consuming a significant amount of CPU.
- naikrovek 7y ago
  That's because of Slack, not because of .gif files.
swebs 7y ago
>They are always auto-playing with no concept of play and pause. Which is why I can't wait for GIFs to die.
Vinnl 7y ago
I can't find it quickly now, but I recall some browser vendor (perhaps Apple?) discussing support for videos in <img> tags, but having them behave like gifs as you describe. Not sure what became of that.

masklinn 7y ago

> The most important part of GIFs for me is that they behave like images in browsers. They are always auto-playing with no concept of play and pause. You can drag and drop them from a browser to your desktop to save them. You can save an entire page and have all the image files save with it. I've never had this work for webm or other video formats. The saving bit is the only part which doesn't work right with videos AFAIK. Sound-less (/muted) videos can autoplay and loop, and there's no controls unless you ask for them (via the `controls` attribute) or bring your own. The examples in the article (the scenes are videos) autoplay, loop and don't have control in either Firefox or Safari.

izzydata 7y ago
I understand that they can be made to autoplay with no controls, but I don't even want the possibility of them being paused. This way the format has no choice but to behave as expected across everything.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  There's nothing about allowing play/pause that prevents videos from behaving exactly like gifs. I've seen browsers with play/pause options for gifs, even.
  - lccarrasco 7y ago
    Can you tell me of one, please? I'd like to check their implementation, most play/pausable gifs I see are only converted webms.
  - silversconfused 7y ago
    The stop button used to stop all gifs on a page in firefox and internet explorer. Not sure if that was a bug or a feature though, since the stop button was generally not available when page load finished.
    - silversconfused 7y ago
      (Maybe I remembered wrong, someone else mentioned here that it was ESC, not stop)
      - Izkata 7y ago
        At least on Firefox, it was indeed stop. I believe it still works too, even though nowadays they hide the button, if you expose the functionality through an addon.
- masklinn 7y ago
  > I understand that they can be made to autoplay with no controls, but I don't even want the possibility of them being paused. Your opinions are just that, and usually overridable by the client. The client could even strip your media entirely. And gifs are pausable (used to be ESC though apparently you now need extensions). > This way the format has no choice but to behave as expected across everything. I've got bad news for you: once it reaches the client you're not in control anymore, you can only suggest behaviour.
- souprock 7y ago
  I don't see why we can't use the IMG tag for video and the VIDEO tag for images. They should be unified, with all the same media formats supported. IMG would autoplay, would not have sound, would loop, and would not have controls. VIDEO would be the opposite. For something like a plain JPG or PNG file, it just shows the one frame. Animated GIF files would of course benefit from the controls. The same should go for unification of the VIDEO and AUDIO tags. Play an audio file as video, and you get a black screen with sound. Play a video file as audio, and you just hear the sound.
  - cflat 7y ago
    Agree. Safari has already made moves for this[1], but Chrome seems to be resistant[2]. [1] https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2017/animated-gif-without-the-gif/ https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2017/animated-gif-without-th... [2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=791658 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=791658
  - mr_toad 7y ago
    > IMG would autoplay, would not have sound, would loop, and would not have controls. Why do you hate my phone battery so much?
    - masklinn 7y ago
      They don't though. At similar quality and framerate, a video is much smaller than a GIF (so the radios can be shut down faster) and requires less power to playback (because it's offloaded to the hardware acceleration instead of being implemented entirely on the CPU). Your average smartphone can play 1080p video without breaking a sweat, not so with 1080p gifs. Hell, a laptop will have permanent high-CPU usage on 1080p gifs, as a video it's background noise (https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/43rrf0/pixel_art_gif_as_desktop_background/czkrhzo/?context=42 https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/43rrf0/pixel_art_gif_a...)
- Arkanosis 7y ago
  > I don't even want the possibility of them being paused That's downright hostile to the end user… https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/time-limits-pause.html https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/time-limits-pause...
  - silversconfused 7y ago
    A behavior being unchanged for 30 years is hardly user hostile. It's reliable and trustworthy. Like a good tool should be.
    - untog 7y ago
      You used to be able to press the escape button to stop GIFs on the page. It's not unchanged for 30 years.
      - silversconfused 7y ago
        Browsers have changed, a lot, in sad and unfortunate ways like you mention here, but the gif format is pretty stable.
    - __jal 7y ago
      Any application that doesn't allow me to stop something from being annoying, will be stopped from being annoying by being uninstalled. If browsers made it such that I couldn't not stop .gif animations (or playing video, or...), I would trash that browser. Bluntly, you do not get to control my computer.
      - izzydata 7y ago
        The point is that they are more images than videos. They have no possible way to contain sounds so the annoyingness is limited to having unwanted images in your browser. You can tell your browser to block a particular still image. You can do the same thing to block a GIF. You don't need a pause/play feature on a 2-5 second sequence.
iainmerrick 7y ago
I think the saving part is a big deal. There are related problems like embedding. If you upload a video to Slack, say, you can’t control whether it autoplays or loops. If you upload a GIF it just works.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago

Animated gifs are compressed, and do require decoding. Hell, so do non-animated gifs. Since animation was added in the '90s, GIF is basically just a really inefficient (but extremely well-supported) video format. I agree that there won't be wide adoption of AV1s until it can transparently be interacted with just like gifs are now.

izzydata 7y ago
That is true. I suppose even jpegs are compressed and require decoding. I'm pretty sure it is orders of magnitude quicker than video decoding though. I can have 500 gifs playing at once just fine, but if I had 500 equivalently sized webm h264 videos playing my computer would have a stroke.
- masklinn 7y ago
  GIFs are quite expensive to decode, it's all in software and while the encoding is fairly simple the amount of data is huge (especially for high-quality gif in which each frame will be present in full). Gif playback is commonly CPU-bound on the more complex examples.
- pornel 7y ago
  GIF is super slow to decode, more so than any modern video format! It doesn't seem like it mostly because browsers (slowly) decode GIF as they (slowly) download it, and cache all uncompressed frames in RAM. They don't do the same for <video> tag, because they assume it's only for high-res, non-looping video. • GIF data is huge. 15x-20x times larger for the same dimensions & quality than normal video codecs, and sheer amount of bytes to chew through eclipses any savings from it being slightly simpler. • GIF's compression doesn't support any parallelism. Frames have to be processed bit by bit, frame after frame. Your multi-core CPU can use only a fraction of its speed when decoding. OTOH modern formats support parallelism on all levels - frames, tiles within frames, blocks, transforms. Modern CPUs can process these very effectively. • In modern systems RAM is ridiculously slow relative to computing power available on the CPU locally. However, GIF's LZW is based on lookups in a dynamic dictionary, so not only you have just one CPU core process it, the core mostly spends time chasing pointers. • There's no hardware acceleration for GIF. For newer codecs it's quite common and very power-efficient. There's no technical reason (other than legacy code) stopping browser vendors from treating AV1 just like GIF, with all looping <img> glory. In fact, Safari already supports H.264 in <img>! It's faster in every way.

numlock86 7y ago

> It may take longer to load, but I can have 100+ GIFs playing at once with no impact to my CPU. I remember this myth, saying that the first moon landing required as much computing power (command central, ship etc.) as rendering a GIF. No mention about the resolution, frame speed and so on, though. Hence I think it's a myth. On the other hand you could probably tune those parameters enough to actually make it a true statement ...

pjc50 7y ago
GIF is not very CPU-intensive, but I definitely remember systems slow enough that JPEGs loaded at visible speed over a couple of seconds. I also had a Libretto 30 that could play MP3s, but only with the Fraunhofer decoder and not the Winamp one which couldn't quite keep up with realtime.

Causality1 7y ago

Yep. You can include them in any forum or comment post that supports [ img ] tags. That's one reason why it's so infuriating that Google Image search now returns videos along with images because video-gif sites like Giphy look just like actual gifs in the results but you can't embed them.

pjc50 7y ago

Strong agree. Just as HEIF is a video format adapted to be a still image format, the GIF successor should fit in an img tag and be guaranteed not to have sound. Perhaps it could be a different sort of container with the same compressed bitstreams. There is an AV1 "image" format too, which supports "image sequences" but not, oddly, animation.

floatingatoll 7y ago
GIFs, in pre-AV1 terms, are simply a video with 100% lossless I-frames and autoloop enabled. You can express the “lossless frames” aspect of GIFs today in existing video ways supported by MJPEG, H.264, H.265, or AV1 today. AV1 image sequences are meant for sharing an album of stills, and are not a convenient shortcut for this. Feeding a sequence of frames into `aomenc --lossless=1` should, assuming everything else is working correctly. I believe looping is not currently a property that you can readily set at the codec level, which is perhaps the most critical missing feature of AGIF when considering codecs. Perhaps focusing on the “loop” flag’s presence/absence and whether it’s honored by browsers would most usefully serve the post-GIF world?
- gsnedders 7y ago
  Would looping not make more sense at a container level, not a codec level?
  - zbobet2012 7y ago
    Far more sense, but containers are a disaster zone in video. Is it av1 in webm, mp4,fragmented mp4/cmaf, or ts? Where does the flag go in each?
    - floatingatoll 7y ago
      And for bonus disaster problems: Should AGIF continue to autoplay when in more efficient other formats it may not?

yoavm 7y ago

> It may take longer to load, but I can have 100+ GIFs playing at once with no impact to my CPU. I don't know what you're talking about really... I was just using Google Slides today and both Firefox and Chrome went to 250% CPU usage, only because there was one slide with a 5 seconds full screen recording GIF. I begged to the person who added it to turn that to a video.

lotyrin 7y ago
Yep, browsing pages laden with too many GIFs is my favorite way to have a hot laptop that sounds like it's getting ready to lift off and get my low battery warning to pop up.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
In my experience that's a google slides problem, not a gif problem.
kkarakk 7y ago
Google problem not gif problem, sites like knowyourmeme embed 10 gifs in a page routinely with no issues(apart from the loading time)

bluedino 7y ago

>>I can have 100+ GIFs playing at onee with no impact to my CPU It wasn't that long ago that a page full of emoticons (animated gifs) would bring a computer to it's knees (when posting on vbulletin or something)

kec 7y ago

> [...]but I can have 100+ GIFs playing at once with no impact to my CPU. That's... not entirely accurate. What do you think is rendering all those gifs to screen?

kazinator 7y ago
The other seven cores that are not being identified as "my CPU".
izzydata 7y ago
No "major" impact to the CPU. As insignificant as displaying however many frames exist in the gif as still frame jpegs at the same time.
- kec 7y ago
  That's still not accurate. Load up 20-30 gifs on a page and I can pretty much guarantee you'll see your browser saturate a core.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Challenge accepted. https://www.hampsterdance.com/classics/originaldance.htm https://www.hampsterdance.com/classics/originaldance.htm Just did it on my 2011 MacBook Air. Pushes all four cores up... about 15%.
    - a_t48 7y ago
      Do things change if each gif is different?
    - kec 7y ago
      Try again using a gallery page on a site like giphy which is going to be more representative of the use case op was talking about. edit: such as https://giphy.com/sports/2019-stanley-cup-playoffs https://giphy.com/sports/2019-stanley-cup-playoffs which seems to be entirely gifs if you view page resources in the debugger.

Osiris 7y ago

I had to turn off GIFs and animated emoticons in Slack because it was making my fan spin up and consuming a significant amount of CPU.

naikrovek 7y ago
That's because of Slack, not because of .gif files.

swebs 7y ago

>They are always auto-playing with no concept of play and pause. Which is why I can't wait for GIFs to die.

Vinnl 7y ago

I can't find it quickly now, but I recall some browser vendor (perhaps Apple?) discussing support for videos in <img> tags, but having them behave like gifs as you describe. Not sure what became of that.