[blt]

I don't think gifs' recent surge in popularity has anything to do with technical issues like browser compatibility. They became popular because of artistic/aesthetic value and web culture. These features all differentiate gifs from 2010-mainstream forms of embedded video like Youtube:

  - starts playing automatically
  - loops seamlessly
  - never has sound
  - no logos or buttons like "share" and "embed"
  - no scrubber bar on the bottom
  - repeated instances of the same gif play back in lockstep
  - no frame around it
  - pixel-perfect control

All these features make it possible to create art that wouldn't work with embedded video. (Defining art broadly; captioned movie clips are included.) In the past few years, some creative people started making really good gifs that took advantage of these features. Then the trend spread through web culture. The next generation made gifs because "making gifs is what clever artistic people do on the internet".

It's always been easy to create a looped animation format that combines the feature list above with a better compression scheme. Now that gifs are so popular, someone recognized the need and made one.

IMO, the 256-color dithering was more of a necessary evil for most gif creators, although some took advantage of it. It looks nostalgic on 90s Gourard-shaded untextured computer graphics. But for movie clips, etc, I think many will be glad to get rid of it. I bet we'll see a sect of gif creators who think mp4s are not authentic while most people won't care.

Your last comment reminds me of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room" (wiki/youtube). Someone repeats that idea with every lossy medium we invent. I've seen jpeg and vhs examples but I can't find the links right now.

[freyr]

I think your list of features is spot on, but I don't think their mainstream popularity had much to do with artistic expression. I'd include one other big feature:

   - They are dead simple to save (or link to) and drop into your own page/blog/comment.

and claim that GIFs are just really easy to share and view. They've offered a better experience both for post and viewing a short soundless clip than could be provided by an embedded Youtube player.

[mbesto]

How about the fact that there is zero advertising. IMO this is the number one piece of friction for videos (mainly YT) and the users don't want them for especially quick moments (a la Vine).

[michaelmior]

There's nothing really stopping people hosting GIFs from putting in advertising. Although it's true that I haven't seen examples of this happening.

[snogglethorpe]

> They've offered a better experience both for post and viewing a short soundless clip than could be provided by an embedded Youtube player.

I'm not sure that's always true, as there some very noticeable problems with GIFs. Most significantly they're often huge, and must be entirely loaded to play properly, which can result in long delays before they can be viewed (usually with no obvious indication to the viewer) and massive resource usage (besides the problems related to size, animated images also usually don't benefit from the sort of acceleration and optimization that videos do). A page with a bunch of embedded GIFs (not at all uncommon), can completely kill a browser.

[There are other problems, of course, e.g. the complete lack of user control over playback, but the size of GIFs seems to be one of the worst.]

[fennecfoxen]

> IMO, the 256-color dithering was more of a necessary evil for most gif creators, although some took advantage of it.

I'm under the impression that the format only specified 256 colors per palette, and that you could use different palettes on a per-frame basis, including frames with 0ms delays between them. and I know some software existed to make this possible, though I don't recall if it made it possible with animation at the same time...

[TheZenPsycho]

the format permits frames with 0ms delays. the problem is that there has never ever been a browser that respects the 0ms delay. On the whole, the status quo is that any delay under 10ms gets upgraded to 10ms.

Newer (current) browsers have lowered that to 6ms, and in chrome, 3ms. As yet, there has been no browser that respects the 0ms delay (as in, supposed to display instantaneously, so 2 frames with 0ms delay is supposed to look like 1 frame).

The justification for this is backwards compatibility with incorrectly authored gifs. So .. there you go.

[f00l]

'gif is my spirit animal'

  - no choice paralysis
  - dead simple
  - can have sound
  - easy to shoop
  - drag/drop
  - cut/paste

viva la GIF

[nl]

And perhaps most important: Many forums (and applications) allow embedding of images, but not videos. That <img> tag works everywhere...