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Mozilla’s APNG (animated PNG) format was created to replace GIF ten years ago, but that didn’t work out at all. People have tried to replace the GIF format.
HOW TO USE GIFS ON FACEBOOK MESSENGER MP4
The GIF format also doesn’t support semi-transparency, and GIFs often have a large file size (more than MP4 video files) because they’re uncompressed. GIF files are 8-bit, which means that they’re restricted to 256 colors and almost always look like crap. Honestly, GIF is a terribly outdated format. These services are integrated into apps like Twitter, and Facebook Messenger, and your phone’s keyboard, so they’re just as easy to use as emojis or “stickers.”īut why the GIF file format? Why hasn’t something else come along? The classic dancing baby GIF. Plus, sites like GIPHY and Gyfcat make it super easy to share and create GIFs. GIFs are gaining popularity because, like memes, they’re useful for communicating jokes, emotions, and ideas. In fact, the GIF format may be more popular now than ever before. It helped to define early GeoCities websites, MySpace pages, and email chains (remember the dancing baby?), and it’s still a large part of internet culture. In other words, GIF is older than about 35% of the US population, and it predates the World Wide Web by two years. See, GIF files can hold multiple pictures at once, and people realized that these pictures could load sequentially (again, like a flipbook) if they’re decoded a certain way.ĬompuServe published the GIF format in 1987, and it was last updated in 1989. Also, the GIF format wasn’t created for animations that’s just how things worked out. For one, they don’t have sound (you probably noticed that). If anything, they’re more like flipbooks. We say “animated images” because GIFs aren’t really videos. But the GIF format has a special feature-it can also be used to create animated images like the one below. Like the JPEG or PNG file formats, the GIF format can be used to make still images. In its simplest form, a GIF (pronounced “gif” or “jiff”) is just an image file.