890843 - Missing control capabilities on animated GIFs for a user (GIF Player capabilities: pause, stopping, per frame forward etc)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[yester129]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130703181823

Steps to reproduce:

In wikipedia, there is a extensive usage (alone on commons 7700 are listed http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Animated_GIF) of animated GIFs for presenting technical or medical phenomenas. E.g. this one: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gef%C3%A4%C3%9Fmalformation, showing a 3D image of a medical phenomena as 2d slices in a looped animation.

As reader I a can't stop the animation or forward frame by frame to take a detailed look.


Actual results:

No way to control the animation for a reader, neither a menu after right-mouse-button click nor a control menu by a player is available.


Expected results:

The reader should have a possibility to control the animation like it is possible with other video formats.

Some kind of solution exists in form of a javascript player, called JSGIF, which could be used as prototype or directly as solution as the code is under MIT license.
http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/ (code on github https://github.com/shachaf/jsgif)

Another solution would be if the firefox would accept GIF as supported format for the HTML5 video tag, at the moment no browser seems to allow this (http://dashes.com/anil/2011/07/animated-gifs-triumphant.html)

Related Bugs:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=884614
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=825486
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211145

Comment 1

[Paul Silaghi, QA [:pauly]]

Gavin, could you please take look over these solutions ?

Comment 2

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

As I understand it this is asking for us to implement video-like controls for GIF animations displayed standalone. I don't think that's a common enough use case to merit a lot of investment by us, it seems like something best addressed by an add-on.

Comment 3

[yester129]

I see (and it sounds reasonable), but what about the option allowing GIF as HTML5 video tag supported format? Should be not that hard, as the GIF decoder exists already and should be possible with minimal effort. Also, Wikipedia is a not completely extic corner-case with thousands of GIF animations.

Comment 4

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

(In reply to yester129 from comment #3)
> Should be not that hard, as the GIF decoder exists already and should be possible
> with minimal effort.

No, it would require a decent bit of effort - the various <video> APIs do not map directly to GIF animations.