Hacker News Reader

Turns out gifs and analytics tracking pixels have a LOT in common.

Analytics tracking pixels normally ARE GIFs, specifically a 43 byte transparent 1x1 GIF.

But most “GIFs” are not GIFs but rather Mp4, mov, or webm or some other compressed file format. Actual GIFs are extremely wasteful of bandwidth and not hardware optimized. The name lives on though.

> Analytics tracking pixels normally ARE GIFs, specifically a 43 byte transparent 1x1 GIF.

Is there a reason for this?

And no, a GIF is a GIF, nothing else is a GIF, an mp4 is not a gif, webm is not a gif.

you can say that, but the big gif hosting serve other formats with better compression by default.

Are you asking why a GIF is used, or why the 43 bytes are needed?

I think a GIF is likely the smallest wide-supported resources format (force the browser request a URL to load a specific resource). The 43 bytes is the minimum size for a valid GIF, so the browser won't log an error loading the image and go through all load events.

It looks like in modern browsers it's 35 bytes: https://stackoverflow.com/a/15960901/407650

Reply on news.ycombinator.com