An interesting quick dive into how some of the artifacts of historical implementations can carry forward decades later. I'm saving this one. While everyone on HN is probably familiar with a pile of examples of this in our own work particularly if you do anything lower level, this is a nice example because it's really easy to grasp even for total non-programmers and gives a feel for the layers upon layers the digital world is built on. Details on the x86-64 bootstrap sequence are interesting to tech people but this is the sort of thing I might show in a school class.

That said at first I thought the author was being a bit tongue in cheek on the suggestion to fix it with:

>A downside to making any changes is that the badly formatted GIFs won't render any more. I reckon just be bold, like the release of Netscape 2.0...If Netscape was fine with breaking poorly-made GIFs, we should be too!

But we kind of have a bit more content now then when Netscape 2 was released, and it seems they're serious?

  Support more than 256 colours in a single frame of GIF animation
  Support fast GIFs (10ms delay)
  No confusing behaviour with small delay = slow GIF
  Better compression for GIFs with multiple small areas updated per frame

But frankly at this point why? We've got good universally adapted image formats that do more than 256 colors. We've got webm and so on (even Apple caved on that one in the end) for baked animation which is much smaller and more powerful than gif, and plenty of CPU and libraries for generation on the fly. We've got powerful ways to do animation purely with HTML/CSS/SVG/JS. GIF is a historical artifact with a lot of its value at this point purely about old things. This wouldn't even retroactively bring newer capabilities to older systems because it would require updated code which by definition means the ability to run new browsers and thus modern capabilities.

I get they really enjoy hacking on gif but come on. Only way I can see it working is if all the players agreed on some metadata that could be added to gifs which wanted 'standards' vs 'historical' playback with the default remaining historical, and potentially also make it a browser setting. That'd still leave the ad issue, but maybe at this point that's moot given the advancements in blockers (and it'd be a very easy thing to look for as an indication of an ad, and thus be selected against).