It's still a very common English word that's spelled very similarly. One can hardly be surprised if people guessing at the pronunciation of "GIF" select a hard 'g'.
Sure. So English has some words which start with "gi-" which have hard 'g's ('gift', 'give', 'girl', 'giggle') and some which have soft 'g's ('giant', 'giraffe', 'gibber', 'ginger'), so both pronunciations are actually reasonable in English for the orthographic form 'GIF'.
