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> 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, a
by sedatk 5y 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 5y agoSafari.. 15? Seems to have broken silent auto playing looping videos for me :/
- asddubs 5y agoapng 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 5y 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