[viro]

thats not how gifs work ffs

[Nextgrid]

Giphy is much more than a GIF though. Here's a link for example: https://media0.giphy.com/media/mlvseq9yvZhba/giphy.gif

If you load it in a browser you get an entire HTML page full of spyware - it is not a GIF. They're detecting the user agent and deciding whether to send spyware or not - only curl'ing the link gives you the raw GIF by the looks of it.