Safari Technology Preview Now Allows Animated-GIF-Like Videos Using ‘img’ Tag

Colin Bendell on a new feature in Safari Technology Preview:

  • Now you can <img src=".mp4"> in Safari Technology Preview
  • Early results show mp4s in <img> tags display 20x faster and decode 7x faster than the GIF equivalent — in addition to being 1/14th the file size!
  • Background CSS video & Responsive Video can now be a “thing”.
  • Finally cinemagraphs without the downsides of GIFs!
  • Now we wait for the other browsers to catch-up: This post is 46 MB on Chrome but 2 MB in Safari TP

It’ll take a few years for this to catch on web-wide, but the benefits are massive. It’s really rather ridiculous how popular the GIF format is in 2017.

★ Monday, 4 December 2017