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It feels like the GIF has had a huge resurgence of recent time. People are making more wonderful animations than ever, GIF was officially the Word of 2012, and in December there was even a GIF Fest in Miami. But it turns out GIF use is actually in decline.
Web Technology Services has been poking its nose around to find out about image use across the internet. But it’s bad news for the GIF: for the first time ever, the PNG has overtaken it in terms of ubiquity. The PNG is now used on 62.4 percent of all websites, compared to the GIF which is used on 62.3 percent. One year ago, the GIF was leading the race by a clear 15 percent.
So why the shift? Web Technology Surveys explains:
[I]t’s the technical superiority that now convinces webmasters to choose PNG over GIF. PNG results in smaller files most of the time, it supports a much wider range of colour depths and transparency options. The only feature where GIF still shines is its support for animation. However, most people find that dancing icons on a website make it look like it hasn’t been redesigned in the last 15 years. Animation is mostly used for ads nowadays, and even there, animated GIF’s would be considered the poor man’s alternative to Flash.
The GIF was was first introduced by CompuServe in 1987, which means the file format is now over 25 years old. Can it see through another 25? [Web Technology Surveys]
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Thank goodness for that. I wouldn’t mind GIFs so much if the frame rate wasn’t so atrocious. It’s not video, it’s a slideshow!
That’s kinda the point. But I agree – far too ugly in this day and age.
You say that’s kinda the point, but I rarely see GIFs that are actually used like a slideshow. Heck, even the GIF used for this article is taken from Arrested development, which is shot at what, 30fps? The GIF here is clearly trying to imitate video and failing miserably.
I don’t get why they’ve suddenly become so popular in the past month or so anyway, like I say they’re hideous!
No, gif as a format arose from the need for a standardised slideshow format.
Fair enough. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places but I rarely see slideshow GIFs but I seem to come across video GIFs much more often.
Yeah, it’s more often makers taking advantage of the fact that you don’t have to click through (like a YouTube video) and it’s not that resource hungry (compared to much more featured rivals like Silverlight and Flash) and the fact that it’s standard.
Who told you this?
The net was mostly a text heavy colourless world. Then, a company invented a compressed image format that used colour and sequenced images that had great download speeds for dial-up modems. The company was CompuServe and the format was GIF and the year was 1987. This format couldn’t be used for slideshows because it wasn’t till a few years later that the ability to add timed delays between the image sequences was included as a feature, and the ability to wait for user input was then also added into the mix – so it was only two years after the invention that you could have made an impractical on-line slideshow using GIF. Why would someone do that? I full page GIF slideshow would be a major pain for users, all that compressed text and images over a dial-up!!! If it was offline slideshow then you had better image formats to be using.
“GIF as a format arose from the need for a standardised slideshow format.”
I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the above quote is an incorrect statement.
they can be awesome, check out this persons work
That is still 62.3% of more websites than ever before.
Additionally, who knows how good a proxy number of websites is for number of occurrences (i.e. a file format used only on tumblr may show a very low score, but make up a vast % of total images online).
Dear Giz,
GIFS have only been popular on this site.
Get over them.
Love,
The internet.
This x1000. You win yourself 100 Internet Points.
Love Benjamin.
There can still be a use for them though. Just made this from the Star Trek trailer.
http://postimage.org/image/4m5oee9o5/
ghaztehschmexeh just earned 100 good karma points!
Also here is a good gif I just made to express what I thing should happen to gizmodo guys for lying about gifs:
http://imgflip.com/i/j6y0
They server a purpose, that don’t need redesigning, I have no problem with them. People just like to complain about everything tbh.
This +1
Dear Jamie:
The only site where I still se GIF’s is gizmodo and I am sure you are perfectly aware of this fact. I do know you just did it to get a lot of comments and clicks on your post so you can justify your job here. I understand, you are not the only one doing it and everybody in the media business is doing pretty much the same nowadays since anything informative or talking about the truth (any thruth) is banned from communication corporations such as Gawker media. We gizUk readers also like to bash posts as a stress relief and also as a way to meet new geek friends.
But please, give it a little more thought next time so you look better as a professional and we readers have a little more challenge an fun when looking for arguments to bash the post.
Regards,
Otavio Zabaleta
Web standards, god I recall when we gave a shite about creating the best on-line user experience. But everyone is a web designer today, and apparently a really bad one.
“The PNG is now used on 62.4 percent of all websites, compared to the GIF which is used on 62.3 percent.”
Those figures are awful. So 2/3 of websites use PNG, and 2/3 use GIF, so a bunch of these sites most be a mess of every file format in existence.
Also I’ll add, to have an animated GIF on a site is bad form, but better than an animated PNG that is supported by only 20% of browsers. But then we are all thinking and commenting about animated image file formats, because of a nice piece of misdirection from the article and supporting animated gif, yet this article and included figures isn’t about animated file formats. It is about PNG and GIF file formats that can be animated and also in all likelihood not animated. A static PNG alpha transparency file is compatible with 95%+ of web browsers, if someone is using a GIF for a static image on a website, with its bigger file site and lack of alpha channel, over PNG then only they know the reasoning behind that mistake.
Obviously someone doesn’t have a Tumblr account