Why do animated gif images take so long to load?

browser animated-gif
Simpleton picture Simpleton · Jan 15, 2012 · Viewed 19.4k times · Source

Why do simple animated gif images take so long to load before they start animating smoothly in a browser, even when the file size is smaller than the cumulative file size of other non-animated image files that have already loaded on the same page?

Answer

zallarak picture zallarak · Jan 15, 2012

Simpleton, check out this link, it seems to be a common issue: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=295 and: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=478663&start=0

From skimming these two links, it seems that 1) either the design of the browser limits the FPS of gifs or 2) your browser uses a webkit that loads gifs slowly, and switching to a different browser may speed it up.

Related questions

Which browsers do not support animated gifs?

It's seems like all major browsers (ie, firefox, safari, chrome) support animated gifs. Though I've been reading that IE might not be faithful to high frame rates. Who doesn't support animated GIFs? Iphone safari seems to just fine. What about …

Read More
How to keep animated gif running while doing intense calculations

I have a page which does some intense and long lasting calculations in Javascript. I would like to have a loading animation to tell the user progress is being made. I have an animated gif now, but the whole browser …

Read More
Hiding the scroll bar on an HTML page

Can CSS be used to hide the scroll bar? How would you do this?

Read More