Sam Thorogood for Google Web Dev Posted on Jun 28, 2018 • Updated on Sep 18, 2018 GIFs, or JIFs, are one of those strange oddities of the internet. The format is slow, inefficient, and from the 80s (!)- did we even have color screens then? Yet today, they're everywhere. But if you want to work with this format on the web—rather than just displaying it in an <img>—the best practice is to read a GIF