I'm glad someone else thinks like this, the other devs on my team get so caught up on the little things in the application we are building and all this little crap the user won't care about if it doesn't work as they expect. I end up being the only person saying "If I was the user, I'd expect this. And if I was doing this, I expect this behavior". Instead, they act as if the user has a PhD in cs, and instead, the user for what we are making likely barely graduated high school.

software should be developed in terms of the user, not the developer. Not every one knows every windows/linux command and debugging to fix problems.

While I agree with this pro-user sentiment, you best believe I will be there in 5 years to complain about all the unbelievable choices made by software developers for the sake of pleasing the lowest common denominator users who just gets used to whatever UI they learned first and now all future programmers are forced to copy that UI, no matter how bad it is for future generations to come.

Well, that doesn't apply here because gifs still have better UX than video for many use cases. Nobody wants to use video as it's implemented right now for reaction gifs.

Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another.

These aren't "lowest common denominator" things. They're everyone things.

> Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start.

Uh... Right click, "Save video as..." in Chrome. Has been that way as long as I can recall. I'm 95% sure Firefox works the same way. No idea about IE or OG Edge because who really cares, presumably Edgium behaves like Chrome.

A lot of sites override the right click menu in one way or another, but that's not the browser's fault. A standard video embed is easy to save.

> Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another.

I think that might run in to some practical limitations, both in terms of simple clipboard data limits and the fact that while an image is loaded entirely in to RAM to play a video may not be. If the user does a right-click>copy five seconds in while the video is still loading but has already started playing, what should the browser do? How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie?

Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images.

> How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie?

You can’t yet. Thats the point. GIFs are not 100GB 4K movies, yet the current state of the art treats the two the same.

We need a standard method to distinguish an (optionally) looping, soundless “GIF” video from a traditional video, and mimic the behavior of an image in the case of a GIF.

Also GIF videos needs to behave like GIF images consistently across all modern browsers and mobile devices.

If the right click menu itself is the problem, that kind of is the browser's fault. Especially when firefox has an override for that, pressing shift.

> Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images.

Copy is already broken and weird for images, since it doesn't get you the original file. But if you fixed that, I would expect pasting to give me a 'transferring...' window as long as the browser is still open and it can't be fed from cache. That wouldn't be particularly hard to implement. (And being unable to feed from cache wouldn't be unique to video at all. Image downloads already ignore the cache all the time.)

And as long as licensed video codecs are a thing, the UX for gif's will always be better.

Yes, videos lose quality and sound when converted to a gif. They also lose proprietary encoding and all their metadata (including licensing information).

This makes gif's infinitely more transmittable on the web.

When you run the user studies to tell me what's good, I'll believe you. Until then, I'm using the last published user studies which were Microsoft's work leading up to Windows 95. :P

Just depends on whether or not there is a genuine usability and discoverability improvement or not. Most new UI is trending towards way worse. Particularly in mobile.

I only ever got to participate in live user testing once. We shelled out for the room with the one-way mirror and everything. Watching normal people use our thing was most excruciating and educational. We were literally hopping up and down on our side of the glass, hooting and shouting. It was brutal.

At my job we try and do this weekly or every other week with real users testing our apps. You can’t ever guess what they want without seeing them use it and asking questions.

This is a good point, and it's something I have often come across with various experts. Some take it to an extreme and assume everyone else is dumb and they're the only one who knows what's good for them. I'm not sure what the correct term for this type of thinking is, but I've always disliked it and tried to help people actually empathize with the other side. And yet, people still like to go around saying "people are stupid" etc.

If I were to guess, I think the internet has somewhat helped make this worse, because it separates some of the human connection from your everyday interactions. If you can't read someone's emotions on their face, and you're just reading their words on a support ticket, it's very easy to dismiss them as dumb or foolish when in fact it's you who does not understand the problem from their perspective.

I guess part of the problem might be that what's obvious to someone who's already encountered that problem may be non-obvious to someone who's entirely new to a particular domain (or product or whatever).

Many developers didn't realize yet that the average person actually don't care about technology. They want to press a button to send an audio message, search and watch cat videos, read some news, with less friction as possible. They are not even remotely interested in how it works.

Yeah, this will be part of what holds back A.I. in the future. A.I. software is being built in the mirror of how the developer thinks. It's being made to think and act robotic with error correction instead of being made of mistakes, misunderstandings and abstractions like a real person.

I think there's a chance this can happen when AV1 starts to gain adoption. Webp had a chance - you can have well encoded, looping video in a .webp container that operates exactly like an image. The issue was lack of adoption - it never took hold due to Apple not adopting it in their ecosystem. AV1 has support from every major player in tech, and .avif images support gif functionality just fine.

Until that happens though, I just don't see .gifs ever losing traction. I still need to upload gifs to slack if I want autoplaying/looping behavior without user interaction, I still need to embed .gifs in my confluence pages, and when documenting user interactions in github readmes gifs are still king.

FWIW I've made a small user script for encoding gifs in a two pass approach (as most gif encoders I've seen do a pretty shit job). If anyone wants it here's the script: http://files.jjcm.org/gif.sh

(to use, just type `./gif.sh -s=SIZE -f=FPS input.mp4 output.gif`)

>The issue was lack of adoption - it never took hold due to Apple not adopting it in their ecosystem

It's not just Apple, webp files can't even be opened by Photoshop. You're basically making proprietary Chrome image files if you actually use that format.

Ehh... Firefox can open them just fine, as can GIMP, as can (apparently) my OS's image thumbnailer. (Though oddly enough not my OS's image viewer.) Support isn't universal, but it's certainly not a proprietary Chrome format.

Almost every computing app in the world supports JPG,PNG and GIF. Together we could only name 3 apps that can open webp and only one of those is an editor.

Shaking my head as to why this format has any support at all.

GIMP is supported on every practically usable operating system and can edit animated webp just as well as gifs.

Doesn't matter how many platforms it's on it's still one app.

Until webp works everywhere then the web shouldn't be polluted with this proprietary Google Chrome image format.

But most people use photoshop already

Most people? Given how much it costs? I doubt it, or Adobe would be the company with the highest valuation in the world.

Why is this?

Yes I think the fact that GitHub doesn't support videos at all shows how far away a gif-free world is.

AV1 (AVIF) is going to hit the same lack of adoption. Apple is already steaming ahead with HEIF files, while Google is stalling implementing them, and vice versa.

It looks like WebP Animation only supports I-frame like GIF Animation. I-frame only video should not be efficient so not suitable for video, looks better to just use VP9. (maybe good for icons)

> I-frame like GIF Animation

What does that mean?

Actually webp is widely adopted but you may not know it. For example giphy.com encodes to webp but they’re renamed to .gif files.

I suspect any future attempt/format may have a similar problem. Has anything changed re: Apple preferring to stick with MPEG LA endorsed formats?

>AV1

I often trip on that, was similarity with AVI accidental or intentional..?

I use a chrome-based browser, but because it's missing some component, probably due to stupid DRM crap, most videos on most sites don't play for me. However, some of them do work. I don't feel like I'm missing much. But GIFs are certainly way more usable than video. I'm also writing web-based forum designed for backwards compatibility with older browsers, so GIFs will always be the default for me.

Chrome has insane behavior where it will only autoplay videos from web sites Google trusts. If I put a video on my own web site and domain (muted, autoplay, etc.), it won't autoplay. If I put a gif up, it will.

Google claims this doesn't apply to videos with muted, but at least in my Chrome, it does.

Muted-by-default makes complete sense to me. I hate it when a web site makes noise. But no autoplay (even muted) is broken.

So is having Google act as the arbiter of which web sites get to autoplay (Google's Youtube) and which ones don't (my personal domain). That's a huge conflict-of-interest and hugely anti-competitive behavior right there. It crushes the little guy.

Disclaimer: Google claims this is based on some kind of objective metrics.

Considering the noisy ads on some websites I visit, I believe they're using some other metric.

But the metric is bad.

Author here. That is good criticism! Thanks for bringing it up. I didn't consider other factors like ease of sharing.

They are definitely tradeoffs. At least for my personal website, the size disadvantage of GIFs still outweighs them, in my opinion. I think bandwidth usage and battery drainage are also worth thinking about on behalf of the user.

I disagree, the phone/laptop manufacturer will get blamed for bad battery drainage, not the app/website/media.

For bandwidth, I'm going to blame my ISP, Chrome, firefox, etc.

For the media (gif versus movie), I'm going to blame the website.

As a website operator, I feel a personal responsibility to consider how my choices affect those things, even if my users might incorrectly blame others instead of me.

Thank for you reply. And of course, you have a good point. If what is important to you is saving space and bandwidth, then serving videos is probably the best solution.

The irony is a modern gif filetype would be even better. Something that retained the advantages of gifs, but allowed for better compression.

We don't even need a new file type, we just need browsers to let us use video files like MP4 et al in IMG tags and give us gif-like behavior (muted, autostart, and loop).

I mean, I know everybody is really pumped about webGL and shadow DOMs and webcomponents and webASM, but I feel like the basic "html as document language" could use some loving to solve this.

This whole mess reminds me of SVG. I get that there are fantastic reasons why SVG has JavaScript and its own DOM and can pull in external resources, but sometimes we don't want a whole new framework for new forms of content, we just want an IMG.

Amen, thank you. It's incredibly user-hostile to replace gifs with video.

Truth.

Gifs have just enough capability to be really useful and very hard to replace.

I personally hate videos just served up. Not always, just most of the time doing that causes more grief than it adds value.

> The video per se won't loop if I save it in my computer or phone

it does for me with VLC (it is dependent on your player if you save it to your computer)

But yeah, I can't right click on a video to save it. Got to use youtube-dl for that...

> THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOUR, EVERYWHERE.

no sound?

> no sound?

No sound by default depending on user settings would actually be progress in my opinion. But considering half the online video players break in some way as soon as I disable autoplay in the browser I don't think this will be achievable before the end of the century.

I'd rather take inconvenience instead of insane worldwide bandwidth waste. Whenever I used to see my own gifs stats on imgur I was quite sad.

isn't what gifv is?

if you try to save, you get a webm or mp4 video

Doesn't using webm require sigining away their right to ever sue Google for patent infringement?

No. Originally, the webm license required that you couldn’t sue google for patents related to webm. They switched to BSD in 2013.

Meanwhile, there have been numerous patent suits against google from other big companies around VP8, VP9, and webm. Google isn’t the bad guy in this story.

Thanks I didn't know about those developments!