alt Hacker News> “Smoothly rendering a GIF”
Animated GIF is a format that was designed for playback on late 1980s PCs with a 20 MHz 386 and VGA graphics…
If anything, this example proves the point that we’ve made the simple stuff much too complex. The GIF format hasn’t changed, but somehow getting those indexed color frames to screen on time now requires a GHz core.
Replies
GIF playback should be efficient but...
About twenty years ago I was generating long animated GIFs. They worked fine in Firefox. In Internet Explorer they started fine but became jankier as playback progressed. I realised that every time IE displayed a frame it was rereading the entire file from the beginning to get to the current frame. Which took longer and longer as the current frame advanced.
It's just so easy to squander performance without noticing.
The reason you need a GHz core is that modern GIFs stretch the file format to its limits, by doing 30 or even 60fps in extremely-coloured files with resolutions that easily beat the render resolution of 1980s PCs just in a little corner of the screen.
GIF is an awful format for its modern usage that will easily waste tens of megabytes for even a short and small file. That's why many services secretly convert GIF files and serve them as video files, or other animated files that are more efficient (such as WebP).
The difference in opinion between "the simple stuff" and "missing the bare basics" seems to come down to what year you were born and what kind of services you grew up with. I don't need 90% of what Discord has to offer me but when reading along with discussions of Discord users looking for alternative platforms, fleeing their age verification and such, I find that most Discord users will absolutely demand the features I didn't even know chat apps support.