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Please Stop Making Terrible GIFs
(thereallo.dev)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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I’ve honestly given up on support of new formats.
Here we are, 2026, and brand new software like Lemmy:
Doesn’t support AVIF
Doesn’t support JXL
Doesn’t support WebP
Won’t upload short, small videos either.
Meanwhile:
Many clients won’t play animated WebP
Most clients won’t play APNG
Many won’t load AVIF
Basically only Apple/Safari will load JXL
VP8/VP9/AV1 support in video isn’t universal
What am I supposed to do?
I used to send support requests over this, but I’ve given up. We are going to be stuck with SDR JPEGs and blocky GIFs forever, especially since media format literacy seems to be globally.
You decide what to target, and work with what you have. That's how it's always been with web technology.
If you need to support the barest minimal possible clients then you might not even have HTML5. Otherwise, if you have HTML5 you can use the
sourcetag to provide clients with a choice of formats/encodings and they can pick the one they support. If the clients can't even mange that, well, things on the internet have always been broken anyway.And somebody's gotta start somewhere, WebP was shoved down everyones' throats and now it's supported very broadly, as AVIF pick up users software devs will take notice and start supporting it.
Will they, though?
I cite Lemmy again. This is supposed to be a newer, better version of Reddit, basically, but I can't even upload a WebP to my instance... when are they supposed to adopt AVIF?
If I try to host externally, which is more of a pain, very few image hosts will take an AVIF. Not a single one I found except catbox will take a JXL.
Where's the pressure? Who's making these files and trying to use them? Even my phone converts uploaded JXL and HEIF files to SDR JPEGs upon upload, since it rightfully assumes nothing will work with them.
I hate to sound so cynical, but I had your mindset a while back. And outside Apple, precisely nothing has changed. Its gotten more dramatic, if anything, since HDR support is now basically DOA too.
The standards bodies and the companies that pay their bills. That's Netflix, Google, et al. All have a vested interest in good multimedia support in browsers. It's why browsers have shockingly good support actually, most of the problems are downstream on clients and implementations that don't know or care to enable these newer formats.