GIF Syntax Has a Big Impact On a Browser's Performance

A common method of allowing animated images to appear on web pages is to include image files that support separate frames of animation that are cycled through by clients' browsers. The role of this sort of infinitely looping animated image has historically been associated with the ".gif" file format since the early days of the Internet. In the eyes of many professional web designers, however, this format for animated media has been deprecated for good reason: GIF files tend to boast large file sizes, which make clients' browsers sluggish while loading them. This is an SEO issue because Google will penalize the rankings of a website if its content pages are laden with heavy footprints that make its pages slow to load for its potential audiences.

The technology governing video file formats has progressed to the point that video files can offer superior fidelity to GIFs while occupying far smaller file sizes. The most recently popularized codec used by web browsers to interpret the contents of video files is one that comes into play when the video file is saved in the ".av1" format. At present, Adobe Firefox and Google Chrome's most recent versions for desktop computers can decode this file format, but mobile devices currently lack this on the hardware level and require the appropriate software to be installed on them.

This means that a website's animated aesthetics being delivered through videos that are encoded for the AV1 format can make it difficult for some users' browsers and devices to interpret. Nevertheless, the small file sizes that the format achieves means that it is only a matter of time before all browsers and devices conform to it as a standard, so the website in this scenario can expect to benefit from using AV1 files in the long term. For the site to avoid causing problems for its audiences until then, though, it should use syntax that detects whether the current client supports the format. If the client does not, the syntax should instead load a separate version of that file that has been saved to an older format. For more information click here https://www.singhkays.com/blog/its-time-replace-gifs-with-av1-video/.