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I'm annoyed that bloated animated GIFs have held on for as long as they have. I'm strongly in favor of allowing more efficient video formats to be used in their

I'm annoyed that bloated animated GIFs have held on for as long as they have. I'm strongly in favor of allowing more efficient video formats to be used in their place anywhere that supports animated GIFs because that actually kills their niche. Allowing img tags to load videos creates an easy upgrade path letting webservers (and CDNs like Cloudflare etc) serve compressed videos in place of GIFs to supporting browsers without needing the HTML to be rewritten at all. Merely "discouraging" animated GIFs without making any change in the browser doesn't do anything to get us away from them. OP's problem seems to be 50% that their browser's disallow-videos option doesn't apply to img tags which seems like an issue regardless of this feature, and 50% that this decision is impure in some way and only makes sense in the context of history and well yeah that's how things work out sometimes when backwards compatibility is king, as it is with browsers. If we ever find a way to stop the world and get everyone to agree to stop doing animated GIFs immediately so we can cleanly cut animation support from img tags, then sure I'll admit that might be the superior option over this.

lapcat 4y ago
> I'm strongly in favor of allowing more efficient video formats to be used in their place anywhere that supports animated GIFs because that actually kills their niche. Haven't the sites that can be bothered to encode animated images as MP4 already done so and switched to the <video> tag? Who is left now in 2022 with GIF that would actually switch to MP4 and not just keep GIF, support for which seems to be in no danger of being removed? Especially since you'd still have to worry about backward compatibility, because neither Chrome nor Firefox have implemented <img> mp4 yet.
sedatk 4y ago
> I'm annoyed that bloated animated GIFs have held on for as long as they have. There are multiple factors: Browsers have lacked a video standard for silent, autoplaying, looping videos without a player UI for a long time because, well, there were GIFs and they worked okay for early web animations. It was the most compatible format too. Videos had also lacked proper tooling to make them smaller resolution or crop them. Since the GIF format was simple, there were plenty of small/freeware tools for editing GIFs. Prevalence of libraries made it easier to integrate them into applications. All those factors combined caused GIFs to stick around for a long time. Nowadays, there are too many standards, I wouldn't even know which format to use instead of GIF; is it AV1, OGG, WEBM, MP4?
- ehPReth 4y ago
  Safari.. 15? Seems to have broken silent auto playing looping videos for me :/
- asddubs 4y ago
  apng is also an option for some cases, which has wide compatibility but it seems like people are generally not aware of it webp can also do animation
- woojoo666 4y ago
  > All those factors combined caused GIFs to stick around for a long time. Nowadays, there are too many standards, I wouldn't even know which format to use instead of GIF; is it AV1, OGG, WEBM, MP4? For an alternative to GIF, the closest web standards are animated WebP or WebM. If you've tried them, the filesizes are much better than GIF. Unfortunately support on Safari is slow on rolling out [1] [2]. And using MP4 videos instead will never be a web standard since they are proprietary formats [1]: https://caniuse.com/webm https://caniuse.com/webm [2]: https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp

lapcat 4y ago

> I'm strongly in favor of allowing more efficient video formats to be used in their place anywhere that supports animated GIFs because that actually kills their niche. Haven't the sites that can be bothered to encode animated images as MP4 already done so and switched to the <video> tag? Who is left now in 2022 with GIF that would actually switch to MP4 and not just keep GIF, support for which seems to be in no danger of being removed? Especially since you'd still have to worry about backward compatibility, because neither Chrome nor Firefox have implemented <img> mp4 yet.

sedatk 4y ago

> I'm annoyed that bloated animated GIFs have held on for as long as they have. There are multiple factors: Browsers have lacked a video standard for silent, autoplaying, looping videos without a player UI for a long time because, well, there were GIFs and they worked okay for early web animations. It was the most compatible format too. Videos had also lacked proper tooling to make them smaller resolution or crop them. Since the GIF format was simple, there were plenty of small/freeware tools for editing GIFs. Prevalence of libraries made it easier to integrate them into applications. All those factors combined caused GIFs to stick around for a long time. Nowadays, there are too many standards, I wouldn't even know which format to use instead of GIF; is it AV1, OGG, WEBM, MP4?

ehPReth 4y ago
Safari.. 15? Seems to have broken silent auto playing looping videos for me :/
asddubs 4y ago
apng is also an option for some cases, which has wide compatibility but it seems like people are generally not aware of it webp can also do animation
woojoo666 4y ago
> All those factors combined caused GIFs to stick around for a long time. Nowadays, there are too many standards, I wouldn't even know which format to use instead of GIF; is it AV1, OGG, WEBM, MP4? For an alternative to GIF, the closest web standards are animated WebP or WebM. If you've tried them, the filesizes are much better than GIF. Unfortunately support on Safari is slow on rolling out [1] [2]. And using MP4 videos instead will never be a web standard since they are proprietary formats [1]: https://caniuse.com/webm https://caniuse.com/webm [2]: https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp