Game Developers; Please stop using GIFS on your pages! Valve, make better store pages!

[Vas]

Not all of us are on Fiber optic internet with perfect new world speeds, and lately a lot of game developers have begun using gifs, the oldest animated format in the history of the computer age, most inefficient and ugly with its speckles and crap compression, to display parts of their game all over the page.

I mean, seriously, use videos for petes sake. But if you MUST embed images into your store page, use better formats. Animated PNGs for example, which Firefox supports by default, and Chrome can support with an extension. Make aPNG great again!

There's also new age things like webm and HTML 5 you can do to embed small clips of video that loop which'd be far less of an issue, but I suspect Valve will need to update the store pages to support such stuff.

As of now, game developers that spam their page with 1GB of gifs cause my internet to stop loading the page leaving all images half loaded or less with everything that didn't load being just white so I get a half white image that can't be loaded anymore and I have to Ctrl F5 the ENTIRE PAGE, to fix it and then it starts all over again downloading an additional 1GB of gifs and breaks, again and again and again. Valve needs to think of a way to fix this issue so that people who don't have new age super speed internet connections can actually load store pages.

Personally, I'd say limit gifs to 1MB max, and limit it to 5 on a store page max for a total of 5MB of gifs. Maybe even limit the total data within the embedded portion of the store page to 10MB. Prohibit game developers from putting 50-100MB of images all over their store pages.

[wuddih]

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/1689305529908117123

[Vas]

Yea, too bad we can't automatically limit the pages with detection stuff to tell the devs "Sorry, too big, you must shrink the size of your page."

But instead it'd just be better if they supported HTML5 code and video formats that could delay loading till after other content is loaded first.

[Supafly]

A simple plain image, no animation or video, should be the primary image to be visible. Users can quite easily go through all the images, animation and videos as they do now.

[Crashed]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Suicidal Monkey:

A simple plain image, no animation or video, should be the primary image to be visible. Users can quite easily go through all the images, animation and videos as they do now.

I think they are talking about pages like this:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/637100/Sonic_Forces/
Loading the page requires loading the GIFs, as they are embedded using <img> tags. It does appear however they may be exploiting something as they are embedding GIF animations with a .jpg extension.

[Supafly]

@Crashed I get what OP means. I still think a single basic image should always be the first any visitor sees. That said clicking on your link to Sonic has a autoplay video, not a gif. Click the video and remove the cross in the checkbox by where it says autoplay. That will make it so every product page the videos are not played and they will select the first image to be displayed instead of a video.

Not sure if that will help with animated gifs or not?

EDIT: After checking no it does't help with gifs. I do have a workaround using Firefox that can be found here

https://uk.pcmag.com/browsers-reviews-and/82660/feature/how-to-stop-gifs-from-auto-playing-in-your-browser

Workaround

Type "about:config" in the address bar.
Click "I accept the risk!" when it comes up.
Find "image.animation" using the search box (just type "anim")
Double-click "image.animation_mode."
In the next box, type ether "once," so the animated GIFs only get one chance to play, or "none" so they never can.


Personally I'd just enter none as I believe that should stop on background preloading. When using Once I can get gifs to work when I click it anyway. But in theory if it should work once then it should be loading it. I'm using it set to none. No issues.

Don't worry about using about:config and the 'Here be Dragons!' warning. I've changed media.autoplay.enabled to false to stop videos autoplaying for years. This only needs to you double click on media.autoplay.enabled to change between true and false, on and off.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

It does not do anything to the GIFs, no.

Vampyr had one during the Summer sale that was bad enough to warrant a few threads about removing them.

[Crazy Tiger]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Suicidal Monkey:

@Crashed I get what OP means. I still think a single basic image should always be the first any visitor sees. That said clicking on your link to Sonic has a autoplay video, not a gif. Click the video and remove the cross in the checkbox by where it says autoplay. That will make it so every product page the videos are not played and they will select the first image to be displayed instead of a video.

Not sure if that will help with animated gifs or not?

I think Crashed is talking about the animated pictures in the About Me section on the Sonic storepage. They do seem to be .jpg.

[Supafly]

Diposting pertama kali oleh cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

It does not do anything to the GIFs, no.

Vampyr had one during the Summer sale that was bad enough to warrant a few threads about removing them.

:qr:

I miss the old days when creating a webpage involved minimalistic approaches that meant keeping things as small, data wise, as possible. Absurd that some webpages take long to load now on a 4790k @ 4.7 ghz and 100mb internet connection. Than a well streamlined webpage on a single core 200mhz cpu and a 28 kbps dial up modem.

ok maybe I'm exaggerating but the amount of **** on web pages is shocking. Why I love my Ad block and no script addons

[Vas]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Suicidal Monkey:

https://uk.pcmag.com/browsers-reviews-and/82660/feature/how-to-stop-gifs-from-auto-playing-in-your-browser

This stops it from auto playing.. What about auto downloading..?

Diposting pertama kali oleh Crashed:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/637100/Sonic_Forces/

That page is in violation of one of the recent rulings that was in the first link on the page. The gifs on that page are over 20MB in size total making the page at least 30MB to load (with the screenshot images).

[Supafly]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Vas:

This stops it from auto playing.. What about auto downloading..?

The 'once' option would obviously mean it DL but I was kinda hoping using the 'none' option would stop the DL. I can't check if using none does actually prevent the DL though