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Comment by jffry | Hacker News Reader

I imagine it's because your phone has hardware H.264 decoders, while GIF is being done in CPU.

No, every mobile can process a 80ties picture format in tiny resolutions. 90ies computers could do that without a problem without any allocation an needed only a fraction of their cpu. Now we have quadcore cpus clocked at >1 GHz in our mobiles. It's just the saved bandwidth. And, btw, hardware allocation is a way overrated. There is a HEVC software implementation for the iphone. Just compare the complexity of HEVC to GIF.

The problem isn't the peak capability of the hardware: it's the strategy used to handle the content. In most web browsers animated GIFs are treated as images, which depending on the browser causes a whole host of potential side-effects (kept around or animating when offscreen, all frames kept in memory, etc.)

Video is video and is in general more properly streamed, evicted from memory, and halted when offscreen.

Yep.

"... But in the worst case all your elements might be grouped into a single layer and the browser has to repaint every single element. And, when it’s done, it still needs to upload everything to the GPU. All of this is work occurs for every GIF frame..."

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/animated-gifs/

> No, every mobile can process a 80ties picture format in tiny resolutions. 90ies computers could do that without a problem without any allocation an needed only a fraction of their cpu

GIF's are really a nineties format (90ties??), the animation and alpha components weren't added to the standard until 1989, and adoption wasn't widespread until after then.

You're also overlooking the fact that you simply didn't get 4.5MB+ GIFs in the nineties like the example given because it would take ten minutes to download that on a 56K modem. I must resign myself to the fact some people never grew up with dial-up!

Animated gifs in 1995 were rather different to animated gifs now.

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