One other thing that I've noticed with the Dev Community is that they are using Cloudinary as a CDN for their image and video assets (notice the URL of the GIF source in the HTML element). Support for the loading attribute on img elements at the time of writing ( See current support here). By reducing the amount of data a user needs to download to view content, they are able to load assets faster as well as use less mobile data (which can be very expensive, especially for us Canadians). This is something very important for Twitter, where users may encounter many GIFs while scrolling their timeline (which translates to more data being downloaded on a user's phone).

Actually, when you post a GIF on Twitter, Twitter converts the GIF into a video, which dramatically reduces the file size.

Video files are much smaller than GIFs and they are more easily decoded in the browsers compared to GIFs. However, there is a better alternative to using GIFs and that alternative is to use videos instead. GIFs are not optimized to be used on the web: their file size is very large and decoding GIFs in the browser is not a very performant operation. With that being said, GIFs are not good for the web. They are used on Twitter as a way to react to something, they are used in blog posts to make them more interesting, and they are used for the majority of conversations amongst coworkers on Slack (or maybe that's just me?). GIFs are an omnipresent part of the internet.

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