iOS 10 includes a lot of new flagship features, from iMessage apps to a Siri SDK, as well as a lot of small tweaks and enhancements. The WebKit blog is highlighting one of these small feature changes, which makes watching animated GIFs on the web way better with iOS 10.
A lot of GIFs today are actually encoded as videos as GIF itself is a very bad format for animated content despite its popularity. However, Apple has imposed many restrictions on how videos behave in iPhone Safari such as requiring user interaction for playback to start until now. Up until iOS 9, many websites displayed GIFs as <video> elements but were held back by the limitations Apple enforced. With iOS 10, silent videos can now autoplay in the page, perfect for animated GIFs …
more…Filed under: Apple
