That raises the question: what do we call these little looping bits of silent animation, if they’re not actually GIF files anymore? But over the next few years, we’ll probably see the switch from GIF to MP4 become fairly commonplace. (Oddly, as far as I can tell, Twitter is falling back to Flash there.) Some browsers also make it a bit less straightforward to save MP4s for later resharing. Some browsers don’t play friendly with HTML5’s video tag yet, so Twitter would have to fallback to something else in those cases. For you, that means less waiting around for GIFs to load.Īre there drawbacks? Sure. An MP4 can be twice as smooth and thrice as pretty, but still come in at a quarter the file size.įor Twitter, that means lower bandwidth bills. Video compression, meanwhile, has come a pretty long way in the past 30 years. That’s why lots of GIFs are just a few seconds long with awful color, yet many megabytes large. The downside? The format is nearly 30 friggin’ years old, and its age shows in maaaany ways. The upside? It works pretty much everywhere. It was introduced in 1987, picked up animation support around 1989, and… hasn’t really changed since. You see, for all of its ubiquity and seemingly recent popularity, the GIF is an antique. Why? Compression, compression, compression. While the GIF/MP4 difference may seem trivial, it’s actually a pretty damned smart move on Twitter’s part. Even if you upload a GIF, it’s converted into an MP4.
They’re MP4s, embedded with the HTML5 video tag.
They’re technically not even really image files in a strict sense - they’re more like video files without sound. Quite the contrary.Īs noticed by the folks over at Embedly, the “GIFs” that end up in your Twitter feed aren’t actually GIFs at all. But there’s a catch! What Twitter ends up showing you isn’t actually a GIF at all. Just yesterday, Twitter started supporting animated GIFs. What’s in a format? Does that which we call a GIF by any other name invoke just as many lols?
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