Yes, it's strange, isn't it ?

In essence, the GIF is a terrible compression format for photos, restricting any image to a maximum of 256 colors. And its compression rate is only high when it can compress large areas of the same colors or patterns. But it works well for images like logos, diagrams, graphs, special lettering, cartoons, etc.

In the early days of the web, the GIF 89-a variant became popular because of its transparency and animation, which is coarse. But hey, the JPEG (at least the version available for web) doesn't even support transparency, and there were absolutely no other methods to animate with.

By endorsing the use of PNG 8-bit, many software developers tried to replace the GIF (for legal and licensing reasons), but they didn't make the PNG any better. Well, PNG-24 bit offered much better image quality (and transparency), but at the cost of a large file size. So that wasn't a thorough improvement over the GIF nor the highly efficient JPEG...

And people kept using GIF for animation, mainly because it's often the only way to show some motion (albeit crude and ugly), without all the difficulties of proper video encoding and decoding, uploading and embedding, or the challenge of modern HTML animation. The GIF file is technically just a plain image file, so if a tool or platform lets users use or upload images, then an animated GIF is a viable file format.

Maybe HEIF will finally surpass all of them in the next years. It offers the ideal combination of variable compression qualities, with transparency, and animation. (It can even replace many RAW formats.)

I hope the W3C will soon allow HEIF to be a standard file format for the web.

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst op Quora: Why is GIF still so popular even after 30+ years?"