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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

On a side note I can't even imagine how big that webpage was. If you like animated gifs, boy have I got the page for you!

All in all, what I've learnt is how many petabytes must be involved in mapping the US and the world and the 3D aspects.

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I'm left wondering how much data would be saved if they were videos rather than GIFs. They'd probably end up being better quality, too!

Most of the GIF only has 2 frames, a video won't be better and smaller.

That's even worse. He took a simple side-by-side comparison of 2 or 3 images, and invested substantial effort into making it far more annoying and harder to compare by an uncontrollable permanent headache inducing slow flicker which is inferior to our built-in saccades. I hate the GIFs on his pages, they're by far the worst thing on his site and why I don't reshare his otherwise very interesting analyses, because they're a crime against the reader.

His use of gifs make differences much easier to see, vs putting them side by side.

It works well for some of the comparisons, but for others I would really prefer static shots so I can take my time examining each. Especially the GIFs that compare more than two sources, such as the ones that include Here and Bing as well as Google and Apple maps, where waiting for the GIF to cycle through all four images is annoying.

If the author is willing to implement it, those things some websites use that let the reader click the image or drag a sliding bar over it to compare might work better.

Regardless, I do appreciate the author's insights.

No, it doesn't. When you saccade normally, you can do so in milliseconds (it's the fastest movement your body is capable of making and is literally subconscious) repeatedly and freely. The GIF yanks away control, forcing you to wait through the slow arbitrary preset cycle, while distracting you reading anything else. And that's in the good case of just 2 frames, when it's 3 or 4, it's much worse, because now you have to sit through the cycle possibly several times just to figure out what each frame is labeled and only then can you begin comparing! Imagine how much more pleasant and easy to read and accessible and less headache-inducing this article would be if it followed a systematic approach of presenting 1-4 images side by side, Apple then Google then misc.

I usually embed webm files with no sound and set them to auto play and repeat. Works really well.

Not so well for Safari and IE users.

True, but the fallback protocol is pretty simple.

You can set multiple video codexs sources in a video tag so safari and IE users can fall back to older technology.

89.9MB, 48.33s load time.

oh, so 1/5 the size of your average news website with a garbage video ad shoved in. And the video content is actually relevant!

Touché.

It kills the browser on my old tablet, presumably from using too much memory (as the same browser version on my smartphone has no issue with it).

78.6MB. Every image is loaded on page load.

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