Gif needs to be EOLd - there is no need to use it as most browsers support modern alternatives like mp4 with real video codecs. Even safari tech preview can now play these inlined.
Perhaps you meant h.264 or MPEG-4 (which should not be confused with mp4 container format!).
You can decode GIFs with a few hundred lines of code. Decoding different mp4 cases requires several orders of magnitude more code.
One big advantage of GIFs is simplicity. So perhaps you could come up with something that could be decoded with at most one or two orders of magnitude more code?
Btw, mp4 is a container format.
The trend of converting gifs to h264 videos is kind of awful in terms of image quality but I'm sure it saves a lot of bandwidth for sites like imgur and twitter.
h264 might have an advantage since it does consume less cpu due to hardware support though.
1. https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/05/01/animated-png-format...
APNG is (can be?) lossless. You have to lose a lot of quality in GIF to get reasonable filesizes. APNG gets you lossless quality with decent sizes.
Quality sticklers rejoice!
Lots of large GIFs used today were converted from H.264 (YouTube, etc.), so the crap quality of H.264 -> GIF -> H.264 is entirely the fault of GIF.
In terms of image quality, it's only slightly worse. But having the same palette for all frames helps to make inter-frame optimization much more efficient.
Yes, I assumed everyone here knows about mp4/h264/etc. Nokia also released a more formal container spec using HEIF, that supports transparency (most folks will complain about patent encumbered issues). However it will be a while before browsers support it.
Personally as soon as I find a mp4 instead of a gif I curse the uploader for not providing a reasonable gif backup I can use and share around.
As it is not yet generally available as something the public will install, and given how long it can take for a wide userbase to upgrade, this support wouldn't mean being able to set gif's EoL to any date soon.
Unless you refuse to let Safari hold you back as IE6 did for so long (and to an extent newer IE versions still do depending on you target audience - in my day job I have no choice but to support IE 8 and 11 to this day). Though if that is the case then you've stopped actively supporting Safari already.