Animated gifs still slow down Safari

Has this issue been fixed? It happens to me all the time on my MacBook w/ Snow Leopard. Haven't tried any browser except safari though since I just got the Mac. Is there a fix or do I need to install a different browser?

I have the same problem. I have completely reset Safari, and I even deleted the various plist files. Safari is running well on all but a few sites, and it always seems to come down to the animated gifs.

Here is one particular site:

http://failblog.org/

Depending on the particular page, it can cause a freeze of up to 90 seconds!

I'm running a fairly new (15-18 month old) MacBook Pro, 10.6.7, no missing software updates, 4 gigs of RAM, 142.59 gigs free on my HD, and I'm only running a few apps, so my RAM isn't all used up. I even ran a permissions repair and restarted about 10 min ago just for kicks.

Frustrating...

It doesn't have anything to do with your machine. I am not sure why, but it's Safari. It's not webkit or the machine. I have tested the issue on the latest builds of Chrome, also a webkit browser, and firefox on several new Macs and iOS devices. All browsers run the animated gif easily on the different macs, except safari which has issues on all the devices including the iOS devices. Here is the gif I made and have tested http://digitalresin.net/viral_test.gif.

Hi Joshua

the example you posted causes no problems here on 10.6.7/safari 5, beyond the known capping of the framerate to ~10fps,

which has been around long enough to suppose that Apple intend it.

No problems here either Joshua. Certain websites, especially forums w/ gif signatures causes Safari to lag.

I'm wondering, is there any way in capping gifs to certain fps? It's getting really annoying and I'd hate to not use Safari. I use Chrome on my other PC's and like to just leave Safari running on this one. I'm on 10.6.8/Safari 5.

hey guys,

Any gif animated image on my late 2011 MBP17 is excruciatingly slow to load up. And if the page holds mode than 3-4 gifs,… then all **** breaks loose. It's not the case of free space, or the cache ..or for that matter not an issue with the performace of the machine as i have an i7 with 16 gigs of ram. I would say plenty in order to display a simple gif. FlashPlayer is updated to the latest version .. all my stuff is updated to their latest verions ...

Is there any fix for Safari nowadays ? I do not wish to use another browser just so that i can watch a couple of gifs ..

thanx

Do you have a link to the gifs you are referring to? I would like to test it and see if I have the same issue.

Also Flash player will not affect gifs in anyway. Gifs are like a flipbook animation. They are made of various frames that they cycle through to create an animation. Their animation can be cycled continuously, set to play once or set to play a certain number of times. The major changes in gifs today are their frame rates. Newer browsers support a much faster frame rate play back. This means that the animation is smoother and not as choppy. The implication is that these gifs have a large amount of frames and it takes longer to download them. They are decieving in that way because a jpeg or png is loaded once, but a gif might have 50 frames which is like downloading 50 jpegs. It's really the responsibility of the designer who made the gif to ensue that a gif doesn't cause issues for the end user.

here is the link that made me post here

http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/10-funny-video-game-glitches-gifs

But i don’t have just an issue viewing this specific site, or these specific gifs. This is a known issue for me on my MBP, as any gifs regardless from which site .. or my bandwidth .. they load up extremely slow.

when i do a test with other people around me on their windows machines, they are able to view these gifs instantly.

and this bothers me a lot, i mean .. there aren’t many things that i hate about my mac, i could probably sum them up to 5, and by far the most anoying one is the fact that whenever there’s a friend posting a gif .. i might as well skip the gif because i can’t spent 2 minutes to see a 10-15 frame gif.

at the moment i’m on a low bandwidth (50KB up / 50 KB down), but as i said i have the same issue also when at home where my speed is 7MB down / 4-5 up.

how could i fix this ..?

I am not sure what type of performance you are getting overall, but I can say that the site you just linked to is loading over 6 large gifs. The one I pulled from the site is 2.8mb to download and was made up of 106 frames. That is not a small gif, it fact it is massive. Now times that by 6 gifs and that is your problem with loading that page and the gifs. It took my browser time to cache the gif file before it could play it back cleanly. This is the fault of who made the gif not your Mac or the browser. That site was pretty sketchy too. It was prompting me to download Lime player or some sort of player. I would suggest you do a complete reset of Safari and dumb any cached files, history, and cookies. Then restart the browser and try this gif I linked to below. It should play back cleanly. It does on mine. http://dribbble.com/shots/550172-Hypercompact-Animated-3D-Logotype?list=searches &tag=gif