5 ms·

I really wonder why GIFs are still around. Apart for being used as short videos for funny things they have not a huge use afaik. They really feel like an old te

I really wonder why GIFs are still around. Apart for being used as short videos for funny things they have not a huge use afaik. They really feel like an old technology. They are also a pain to support on android.

zokier 14y ago
> Apart for being used as short videos for funny things they have not a huge use afaik I wouldn't be surprised if those short videos were the bulk of the GIFs around. At least of the GIFs actually used and being dormant in some long forgotten archives.
sesqu 14y ago
GIFs are simpler, more widely supported, animated, and in many common cases result in smaller filesizes. But I believe the real reason they're still around is people don't want to fix what isn't broken. There are a lot of cases where PNGs are superior, mostly because of the extra color depth. But that's not enough for a speedy transition.
zuppy 14y ago
I think it's because of IE. I know IE sopports transparent PNGs for quite a while, but until not very long ago there were not so many options and people don't really like to upgrade IE apparently.
- ygra 14y ago
  Binary transparency PNGs (i.e. no separate alpha channel) have worked in IE since at least 6. So except for animation support there really is no reason to use GIF.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - iso-8859-1 14y ago
    Some GIF's compress to less data, even after running pngout/optipng/pngcrush.
roc 14y ago
inertia.
MojoJolo 14y ago
A lot of GIFs are use for meme.
ben0x539 14y ago
I wonder what the pain point that is stopping the wider public from switching to a real video format for those short clips is. Given that real video codecs have much better compression at comparable quality, is it just the lack of simple tiny video hosting options comparable to imgur? <video> tags being harder to use on random posting platforms than <img tags>? Chroma subsampling "blurring" clips with sharp edges like from cartoons or 2d videogames? Something less obvious?
- csense 14y ago
  An <img> tag pointing to animated gif should work on every combination of image host + CMS + browser. I'm not sure off the top of my head what HTML 5 market share is like (anyone with recent data want to chime in?), but I'm guessing lots of people are running browsers that still don't have <video> capability.
  - drchaos 14y ago
    http://caniuse.com/#search=video http://caniuse.com/#search=video The percentage of users not able to use <video> is roughly equivalent to the percentage of users running IE8, which is about 20% right now, and probably will stay there in the near future, as XP users cannot upgrade to IE9 (thanks, MS!). The other problem with <video> is that there is still no common format which every browser supports, so even if you would ignore IE8 (or provide a fallback via Flash) you'd still have to encode all videos twice (to H.264 and WebM/VP8). Sad as it is, but Flash for video and animated GIF will stay with us for some years.
T-hawk 14y ago
GIF has a certain mindshare that the other formats don't, crossing over into folks who are less deeply technical. I've worked with a couple web designers and developers that said "Gif" to mean any image, as in "Move that gif up twenty pixels" when referring to a logo that's actually JPEG. I think it's a holdover from the days of BBSes and AOL and CompuServe, where everything really was a GIF. "Check out this new cheerleader Gif I got." It's not a far leap to imagine these users just out of habit and familiarity clicking GIF in the save-as dialog without really thinking about it. So GIF persists out of familiarity and inertia.

zokier 14y ago

> Apart for being used as short videos for funny things they have not a huge use afaik I wouldn't be surprised if those short videos were the bulk of the GIFs around. At least of the GIFs actually used and being dormant in some long forgotten archives.

sesqu 14y ago

GIFs are simpler, more widely supported, animated, and in many common cases result in smaller filesizes. But I believe the real reason they're still around is people don't want to fix what isn't broken. There are a lot of cases where PNGs are superior, mostly because of the extra color depth. But that's not enough for a speedy transition.

zuppy 14y ago

I think it's because of IE. I know IE sopports transparent PNGs for quite a while, but until not very long ago there were not so many options and people don't really like to upgrade IE apparently.

ygra 14y ago
Binary transparency PNGs (i.e. no separate alpha channel) have worked in IE since at least 6. So except for animation support there really is no reason to use GIF.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- iso-8859-1 14y ago
  Some GIF's compress to less data, even after running pngout/optipng/pngcrush.

roc 14y ago

inertia.

MojoJolo 14y ago

A lot of GIFs are use for meme.

ben0x539 14y ago

I wonder what the pain point that is stopping the wider public from switching to a real video format for those short clips is. Given that real video codecs have much better compression at comparable quality, is it just the lack of simple tiny video hosting options comparable to imgur? <video> tags being harder to use on random posting platforms than <img tags>? Chroma subsampling "blurring" clips with sharp edges like from cartoons or 2d videogames? Something less obvious?

csense 14y ago
An <img> tag pointing to animated gif should work on every combination of image host + CMS + browser. I'm not sure off the top of my head what HTML 5 market share is like (anyone with recent data want to chime in?), but I'm guessing lots of people are running browsers that still don't have <video> capability.
- drchaos 14y ago
  http://caniuse.com/#search=video http://caniuse.com/#search=video The percentage of users not able to use <video> is roughly equivalent to the percentage of users running IE8, which is about 20% right now, and probably will stay there in the near future, as XP users cannot upgrade to IE9 (thanks, MS!). The other problem with <video> is that there is still no common format which every browser supports, so even if you would ignore IE8 (or provide a fallback via Flash) you'd still have to encode all videos twice (to H.264 and WebM/VP8). Sad as it is, but Flash for video and animated GIF will stay with us for some years.

T-hawk 14y ago

GIF has a certain mindshare that the other formats don't, crossing over into folks who are less deeply technical. I've worked with a couple web designers and developers that said "Gif" to mean any image, as in "Move that gif up twenty pixels" when referring to a logo that's actually JPEG. I think it's a holdover from the days of BBSes and AOL and CompuServe, where everything really was a GIF. "Check out this new cheerleader Gif I got." It's not a far leap to imagine these users just out of habit and familiarity clicking GIF in the save-as dialog without really thinking about it. So GIF persists out of familiarity and inertia.