Why Is Chrome So Bad At Handling Animated Gifs?

I've tried everything I can find. Nothing helps. Every time I play an animated gif in Chrome, it keeps pausing and sticking. Sometimes for just a half a second, sometimes for one and a half seconds. It's extremely annoying looking. Animated gifs just will not play smoothly. Anyone have any ideas?

 

Have a look over here.
http://www.ghacks.net/2015/03/12/images-slow-down-chrome-to-a-crawl-try-this-fix/

 

Unfortunately, I'd already seen that, and it didn't help. I've just posted a more thorough description of the problem on another forum so I'll just copy and paste from there.

"I'm on an Acer laptop with Windows 8.1. GIFs play fine in Firefox. The occasional stutter but otherwise fine. But in Chrome, there's a regularity to the stuttering. The gif will play fine the first time. But then it pauses and/or sticks every other time. And always at the same points. A stutter one second in, then smoothness, then after the gif begins again, another stutter two seconds in, then smoothness, and so on. I don't mean EXACTLY one or two seconds in. I just mean if I watch the gif enough times, I can predict where the stutters will be."

 

I've discovered that a couple of quite small animated gifs seem to be able to play smoothly with no problems so I'm guessing it has something to do with the size of the gif. Whether that means dimensions or file size, I'm experimenting on now.

 

It has something to do with the size of the gif, as well as the number of frames and the frame rate. I'll check with a friend tomorrow.

 

Cheers. Seems I've figured it out now. Not the technical aspects of it, because I know nothing about those, but it seems that, in Chrome at least, a large gif, with large dimensions, a large number of frames, and a large file size, needs several minutes to load properly before it'll begin playing without sticking. I've just watched a quite large gif loop for about 7 minutes, sticking every time except the first time. But after 7 minutes, the gif began playing smoothly with no interruptions, and did so for about 5 minutes. Why is it that only Chrome seems to have this problem? I've never noticed gifs sticking so frequently in Firefox, certainly not over and over again for several minutes.

EDIT: After 5 minutes of watching the gif loop smoothly in Chrome, I returned to Firefox to post here, then when I was finished, I checked on the gif in Chrome and it's sticking again, even though I never closed the window.

 

Download 2-3 gifs you are having problems with. Close Chrome, and then open those gifs with Chrome. Are they displaying correctly?
Here's a sample to try.

 

Ah, I see. You seem to think I'm talking about gifs that are online. No. I'm talking about gifs that I've just made and am testing in Chrome. In Firefox, they work fine. Even extremely large ones. The sample you provided was only 2.4 MB but one of the ones I'm dealing with is nearly 50 MB, and Firefox can still handle it with no problems. But in Chrome, it takes 7 minutes for it to stop sticking.

 

Ok. So now we know the problem is with Chrome - I avoid everything Google like the plague.
BTW Are you testing the gifs in Chrome because you want to upload them to a site or blog?
FYI If I visit a site or blog that loads a 50 MB gif... I'll never return.

 

Well I had been planning to, then I heard people don't like that. Now the only issue is trying to figure out why there's such a massive difference between Chrome and Firefox.

 

That's like saying why is there a difference between Windows 10 and OSX. Two different companies, different coding etc.
https://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Chrome_vs_Firefox

Don't waste your time trying to figure out why - just use what works for your needs.

It's always good to have more than 1 browser installed. I currently have 4 on my desktop computer (Win 7) and 5 on my Android tablet.

 

The plot thickens...

The animated gif displays fine in Firefox, but not in Chrome.
The mp4 video plays fine in Chrome, but not in Firefox.

And I was about to suggest you make a video instead of an animated gif. The file size will be a lot smaller.
Have a look over here.
http://rigor.com/blog/2015/12/optimizing-animated-gifs-with-html5-video

PS I somehow think you have a blog or website. ?
If you can upload the problem gif and video, I will have a look.
If you don't want to post the link for everyone to see, message it to me.

 

I have been thinking about keeping both Firefox and Chrome. It's just messy when ya wanna view a website that has gifs and apngs and mp4s. If I wanna view a page on the site that has gifs and/or apngs, I have to use Firefox because gifs stick in Chrome and apngs don't play at all. If I wanna view a page on the site that has mp4s, I have to use Chrome because mp4s stick in Firefox. It's just messy.

 

Here's an interesting comparasion of web browsers.

Image format support - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Image_format_support

HTML5 support - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#HTML5_support

 

Cheers. I don't have a website yet but I was planning on having one where I could show gifs and mp4s but I wanted people to be able to view the whole site through the same browser with no problem. Seems that's impossible though.

I'm not worried about the GIFs anymore anyway. If they're really big, neither Chrome nor Opera can handle them well. But Firefox can handle any. So be it. I've been experimenting a lot on the video situation though so I'll focus on that thread from now on.

 

**** me, no browser's perfect, is it? There seems to be NOTHING that can handle EVERYTHING. If I knew **** about coding, I'd ****ing invent one myself.

 

It seems we're stuck with GIF.
Why so little support for APNG & MNG?

Looking at the comparison, it seems Mozilla Firefox is the browser.

 

Exactly. I've never seen an MNG but APNGs are perfect.

 

MNG (Multiple-image Network Graphics) was published in 2001, and like APGN, is related/based on PNG.
Mozilla dropped support for MNG in 2003 and the other popular browsers never supported it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics

Later today I'll make an MNG image and upload it.

 

Cheers.

 

Here you go.
I extracted the frames from a APGN and created GIF & MNG images using Ashampoo Photo Commander. But I didn't like the result. I then converted the APNG to GIF, and I converted the GIF to MNG.
I also copied the properties. The APNG is huge, but the GIF uses the most RAM.

 

Thanks. I'd been wondering why APNGs load faster than GIFs even though they're bigger.

 

The MNG image has the smallest file size and uses the least RAM. And the format is all but dead.
Also, I wonder what the GIF's file size and RAM usage would be if it was 32 bit instead of just 8 bit...

 

You're asking the wrong person there. My first thought would be, bit of what?

 

If you look at the properties of different image formats, you'll see different colour depths.
The popular JPEG supports up to 24 bit, but PNG supports up to 32 bit. The higher the bitrate of audio & video files, the bigger the file size - the same applies to images. And then there's the question of what compression was used...

 

I think I get that. But I've always been more of a problem creator than a problem solver. lol

 

It turns out I'll be sticking with Firefox after all. It turns out all my problems with it, which had to do with the way it plays videos, were caused by the VLC Web Plugin. I was gonna test the 64-bit version of the VLC Web Plugin with Waterfox so I thought I'd uninstall the 32-bit version from Firefox because I don't really need it. As soon as I did, Firefox's native video playback SHOT up. NO freezing, NO stickiness, NO pausing. PERFECT. It now loads animated gifs much faster too. I've spent the last several months wondering why Firefox had suddenly declined in video and animation playback when I hadn't changed anything about the way I encode videos or create gifs, and all this time it was that bloody plugin was slowing everything down. Well good riddance to it.