Animated GIFs not working in IE

Jul 06, 2019

I'm working on a course that leverages a lot of animated GIFs, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting it to work properly, or at all, in IE (works great in chrome). The GIFs either don't play smoothly or don't load at all when using HTML5. 

I've tried publishing to HTML5 with a Flash fallback, but they don't work well in Flash either. In Flash, the GIFs load properly, but the frame rate and quality is severely degraded. This also causes the file size to increase dramatically. 

On average, the GIFs are <2mb.

Any ideas?

6 Replies
Joey Buys

Good day Ian.

You problem might be caused by an Internet Explorer configuration error. I have created a test course with a few GIFs on them purely to stress test the system.

Can you launch the attached file and see if you still get the error?

I am seeing the exact same performance for this test course on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 11 and FireFox.

Ian Monk

Thanks for the response, Joey.  I stared at this problem for way longer than I care to admit, but I found a solution on my end.

Your GIFs work on my end, but the files are setup a bit differently. Let me explain...

I specifically encountered the error on GIFs that started after the timeline begins (>0 seconds) and are set to only play once. For example, I had a GIF of an icon that animated in at the 30 second mark then stopped on the final frame. In Chrome, you would see the icon animated in. In IE, you would only see the final frame of the GIF - no animation. For some reason, the GIF was not loading in IE. Or so I thought. It occurred to me that the GIF was loading and playing behind the scenes, when the timeline started. By the 30 second mark, the GIF had already played through - hence seeing the final frame. Make sense?

The solution for me was to hide the GIFs at the beginning of the timeline, then change their state to normal using cue points along the timeline. It's now working in Chrome and IE. Phew! 

 

Ian Monk

I've tested and retested. As of now it appears to be working! I created all my GIFs in After Effects, published to QuickTime with RGB + Alpha channels, imported into Photoshop, and exported as GIFs with the looping options set to once.

One thing I had to do was hide the seekbar. Things would get wonky if users pressed pause at the wrong time. I created a rectangle that moves along the bottom of the slide to mimic the seekbar instead. It had to be the move trigger because IE does not support wipes and the fly in animation has built in easing that made it inaccurate. 

There may be a better way, but that got things working for me!

Ian Monk

A couple of things pushed me in this direction:

1) The need for alpha channels. I am using animated icons instead of static images. There are times where there are multiple icons on the screen at once. There are times where icons are overlaid on to other graphical elements (images, other GIFs, etc.). 

2) File size - the .mov files that AE generates for these icons were massive. Some were around 2GB for 5-10 seconds of animation! Each GIF is about 2-3MB.

3) Quality- perhaps a personal preference here, but I found the quality of GIFs was better than any video I inserted. Especially for the icons and other AE assets I am using.

 

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