There's actually a tendency for "GIF" to become a generic term for any small animated pictures, rather than what it used to mean.

I saw it many times that "GIFs" were used to denote what actually were small MPEG4 short clips. Made me cringe internally.

Imgur converts most moving images into mp4 and webm, serving the optimal file to the browser the visitor is using. I think this is part of the reason why people use the word "GIF" for any moving media these days as imgur is a very popular medium.

GIF also has the connotation of the animation or video being short (under 30 seconds), often subtler animation, and without audio - whereas "video" implies more a traditional multimedia presentation.

WhatsApp also supports 'gifs' that I think are just short videos with no support for sound that play inline. Kind of what Vine tried to do.

Twitter does the same thing.

I assume Google wants to push their own image format (animated webp) instead of supporting an old format nobody has been using for years.

This is good news though; finally we can start to abandon the cruddy old GIF format and move to something more modern.

> something more modern.

Technically it is more modern — replaces 1989 tech with 1995 tech.

But it's far from being modern. It's very lacking even compared to MPEG-1 from 1993.

> It's very lacking even compared to MPEG-1

Not if you have aliased frames.

You won't ever fully replace GIF, at least not in the next decade. There are too many devices and apps/software that ONLY have GIF support due to the low computational footprint (designed for 1989 hardware). There's a reason why all these sites that have replaced GIF with HTML5 video still have a GIF fallback available. The file size is usually much larger, but it is supported everywhere. 100% of devices will be able to support GIFs. It's hard to argue with universal support.

Also, FLIF is much better than APNG, animated WebP, MNG, etc. If we are going to adopt a new universal standard as a replacement, that's the smarter route.

I am wondering what happens to mjpegs.

They are quite common in cheap cams