It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video ↦
It is 2019 and we need to make a decision about GIFs. GIFs take up a massive amount of space (often multiple megabytes!) and if you’re a web developer, then that’s completely against your ethos!
If your goal is to improve your website your loading performance, then a GIF needs to be yanked! But then how do you have moving pictures? The answer is a video. And in most cases, you’ll get better quality as well as almost 50-90% size savings!
AV1 videos give us smaller file sizes and better quality?! There must be a catch…maybe…read on to find out.
Discussion
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Jerod Santo
Bennington, Nebraska
Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party & takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.
2019-05-10T13:20:40Z ago
2020 maybe, but it’s definitely not time to replace GIFs right now considering the catch you reference in the post is too big to ignore.
Another nice thing about the GIF format and the web is sites treat them just like any other image, so a simple
<img>tag is all it takes. The<video>tag, on the other hand, is much more complicated and not guaranteed to include themutedattribute, so users don’t trust them to be silent.