When I loaded it the page was 60mb and took over 1 minute to fully load.
But I didn't know that.
I started trying to read the article. All I saw were static images that didn't show the author's point at all, until some of them finished loading and started to flash and cause re-layouts.
Now the page is incredibly hard to read because all the images are on auto repeat.
This is a UI disaster, especially for a post about good UI. h264 works and would have shrunken the page dramatically. It gives me controls that let me play, stop, or rewind video. It can play partially loaded videos (which is hit and miss with GIFs depending on browsers).
At the very minimum you could use JS to stop the GIFs from playing when the user isn't mousing over (something I've noticed at Polygon). It keeps them from being insanely distracting.
It's a small text article with animated screenshots. It doesn't load well, it doesn't scroll well, it isn't easy to read. The only reason I stuck on the page was to see just how much time it took to fully load. If it wasn't for the fact I had decided to come here and point out how unusable it is I would have bounced off the page and never come back.
Here's the thing: animated GIF are not the solution. To almost anything. They're designed for small animations, not long high resolution screen captures or real video. If it's over ~150kb or so you should probably start rethinking your format choice. If it's 3 MB, you made a mistake. If it's in double digits like some of the versions before they were updated you've made a HUGE mistake.
Some people only get 200mb a month of data on their cell plans. This one page would use up 75% of that. For animated screenshots.
But I didn't know that.
I started trying to read the article. All I saw were static images that didn't show the author's point at all, until some of them finished loading and started to flash and cause re-layouts.
Now the page is incredibly hard to read because all the images are on auto repeat.
This is a UI disaster, especially for a post about good UI. h264 works and would have shrunken the page dramatically. It gives me controls that let me play, stop, or rewind video. It can play partially loaded videos (which is hit and miss with GIFs depending on browsers).
At the very minimum you could use JS to stop the GIFs from playing when the user isn't mousing over (something I've noticed at Polygon). It keeps them from being insanely distracting.
It's a small text article with animated screenshots. It doesn't load well, it doesn't scroll well, it isn't easy to read. The only reason I stuck on the page was to see just how much time it took to fully load. If it wasn't for the fact I had decided to come here and point out how unusable it is I would have bounced off the page and never come back.
Here's the thing: animated GIF are not the solution. To almost anything. They're designed for small animations, not long high resolution screen captures or real video. If it's over ~150kb or so you should probably start rethinking your format choice. If it's 3 MB, you made a mistake. If it's in double digits like some of the versions before they were updated you've made a HUGE mistake.
Some people only get 200mb a month of data on their cell plans. This one page would use up 75% of that. For animated screenshots.