Perhaps a periodic page refresh would work around the issue. Then that brings up another question, is any part of the gif cached by the browser or downstream proxies / web accelerators?

The client side could wrap the gif image in iframe to control the refresh.

I wonder if this could be used as a way to crash browsers if there's no check for image sizes? Most sites allow user submitted images and over time one could stream big enough gif (...err jif) to crash idle tabs.

i saw a site linked on HN that was using that kind of technique to siplay public camera feeds, if anyone remember the link , would be great to share it again.

Security cameras use MJPEG (Motion JPEG), which works quite similarly to animated GIFs.

They're very easy to find as most vendors have a URL pattern. For example, here're a bunch of public security cameras made by Axis: https://www.google.com/#output=search&q=inurl:axis-cgi%2...

you're probably thinking about this (which now 404s): http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/

Don't know why it was taken down. Here is the old thread : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543465

which mentions the Content-Type "multipart/x-mixed-replace" technique used to constantly update jpegs in the browser.

I'd like to see this too