Why Is Chrome So Bad At Handling Animated Gifs?

[Bruce Wayne]

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?

[TreeTops]

Odd, as I have Chrome on my Android tablet with slowest DSL Wifi and it plays animated gifs just fine. Try FireFox.

[Bruce Wayne]

Odd, as I have Chrome on my Android tablet with slowest DSL Wifi and it plays animated gifs just fine. Try FireFox.

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.

[poisondeathray]

I've had this happen to both firefox and chrome when updating versions. The regularity suggests corrupted cache. Try clearing out the cache (this will force re-downloading of the stuttering gifs) it fixed those stuttering issues for me

[Bruce Wayne]

I've had this happen to both firefox and chrome when updating versions. The regularity suggests corrupted cache. Try clearing out the cache (this will force re-downloading of the stuttering gifs) it fixed those stuttering issues for me

Thing is, these aren't even gifs I'm downloading. They're gifs I made myself and am just testing in Chrome to see how well they look. I've tried clearing the cache but it doesn't help.

[poisondeathray]

What is the framerate , or delay per frame? How are you making them, and how large are they in terms of dimensions and filesize ?

[Bruce Wayne]

What is the framerate , or delay per frame? How are you making them, and how large are they in terms of dimensions and filesize ?

25 fps for both. I'm making them with Solveig Video Splitter, just loading a video and selecting save as gif animation. The dimensions and file size for one are 612x612 and 20.5 MB, and for the other 1014x570 and 49.6 MB. Large files, I know, but they both play absolutely fine in Firefox so what's the problem with Chrome?

[poisondeathray]

Sometimes some extensions /plugins can interfere with GIF handling. Do you have any 3rd party ones installed recently (or did it always play like that for you)

It's besides the point but gif's are supposed to be tiny in filesize and framerate should be 15 or less. (For 25 FPS content you would drop every 2nd frame, the effective framerate would be 12.5). You're going to piss a lot of people off if you upload those types of gifs to your or other webpages

There is a lost art to optimizing gif's because back in the day of dialup, there were enforced limitations on filesize. For some reason gifs are making a comeback

[Bruce Wayne]

Sometimes some extensions /plugins can interfere with GIF handling. Do you have any 3rd party ones installed recently (or did it always play like that for you)

It's besides the point but gif's are supposed to be tiny in filesize and framerate should be 15 or less. (For 25 FPS content you would drop every 2nd frame, the effective framerate would be 12.5). You're going to piss a lot of people off if you upload those types of gifs to your or other webpages

There is a lost art to optimizing gif's because back in the day of dialup, there were enforced limitations on filesize. For some reason gifs are making a comeback

I don't necessarily intend to post gifs that large if it's gonna be a problem. I just get annoyed when I see a difference in performance between browsers.

I don't have any 3rd party extensions added to Chrome at the moment. There are just the standard Google ones that come with Chrome.

[pandy]

Check your browser configuration, perhaps something is activated or deactivated (Hw acceleration?) ?
Side to this it may be a problem with cache/lack of RAM...
Download offline few gif and try to open them locally in offline mode - perhaps there is something active in background - related to network or security (firewall? antivirus software?)

[Bruce Wayne]

Check your browser configuration, perhaps something is activated or deactivated (Hw acceleration?) ?

I've tried the gifs with hardware acceleration turned on and then off. It doesn't make any difference. They still stick.

Side to this it may be a problem with cache/lack of RAM...

I've tried clearing Chrome's cache. That didn't help either. Unless you're talking about another cache. If it's to do with lack of RAM, how come I'm not experiencing the same problem with Firefox?

Download offline few gif and try to open them locally in offline mode - perhaps there is something active in background - related to network or security (firewall? antivirus software?)

I've tried downloading a few other, smaller, gifs and they play fine. So it would seem it's an issue with the size of the gifs. All I really want to know now is why is there a difference between Firefox and Chrome? Why does Firefox play large gifs without a problem but Chrome can't handle them?

[TreeTops]

Probably can't answer that one unless you post a link to a long gif that has your problem. Then someone here can try it on their version of Chrome.

[pandy]

I've tried downloading a few other, smaller, gifs and they play fine. So it would seem it's an issue with the size of the gifs. All I really want to know now is why is there a difference between Firefox and Chrome? Why does Firefox play large gifs without a problem but Chrome can't handle them?

Perhaps it behave like XnView? XnView trying to download whole gif then it is unpacked to 24 bit RGB - as you can imagine with large gif (few tens MB) Windows quickly reporting out of mem.
Download from Microsoft Process Explorer, install it and observe resource usage - you realize that Chrome is called "memory hog" not without reason.

[Bruce Wayne]

Thanks. I was asking about this on another forum and the response I got was basically just Firefox and Chrome are two different browsers and they're gonna handle things differently. I've decided to stick with Firefox. I was having problems with it but those are solved now and, from what I've read, Chrome is too invasive anyway.

[Cornucopia]

Regardless, it is not smart to create or expect to work with, or impose on others, gifs that are in the 10s of MB or more.

Scott

[pandy]

Thanks. I was asking about this on another forum and the response I got was basically just Firefox and Chrome are two different browsers and they're gonna handle things differently. I've decided to stick with Firefox. I was having problems with it but those are solved now and, from what I've read, Chrome is too invasive anyway.

I don't like Chrome and Firefox either - prefer to use something less bloated - Pale Moon https://www.palemoon.org/

Regardless, it is not smart to create or expect to work with, or impose on others, gifs that are in the 10s of MB or more.

Why?

[TreeTops]

Because it takes too long to load on slow DSL and dialup. DUH

[pandy]

Because it takes too long to load on slow DSL and dialup. DUH

Like every other data... my question is related particularly to gif format - you can imagine large jpg files (most of pictures made by smartphones are full of noise and this linked to insanely high resoultion leading to many MB jpg), similar for video files.
Btw - large amount of bandwidth is consumed by advertisements...