Problems with animated .gifs

[mkinstlinger]

Question -

I had a few animated .gifs on some sites I'm doing.
On MY pc, they always look fine and rotate, but on some others (and Macs, possibly), they don't rotate.. just stuck on the initial frame.

Why does this happen, and is there a workaround?
Pre-loading images, perhaps?

[limbo]

Do you have a snippet of code? - could it be linked to a rollover effect? Sometimes Javascript can effect the animation of a gif - if I remember correctly.

[mkinstlinger]

Well, there's JS on the page, but not the script dealing with the animation.
It's a .gif file saved as such.

[Beagle]

Do other animated .gifs work on the computers in question? There are some ISP settings (for example, using an accelerator) that will stop a .gif on the first frame to save download time. But, of course, this would stop all animated .gifs on that computer, not just yours.

[Badger37]

I only rarely use animated GIFs but I had a problem similar to you recently.

My simple animation worked fine when displayed using IE, but in FF the GIF didn't animate.

I found that FTPing the file using a separate FTP client rather than using IE worked for me. I guess the file needed to be in the correct format - ASCII/Binary?

Perhaps this could be your problem?

[penders]

Animated GIFs can be disabled in IE6 (and possibly other browsers)... Tools ¦ Internet Options > Advanced > Multimedia > Play animations in web pages (inc. Animated GIFs)

They can slow a page down considerably if over used on a less powerful machine, so I guess that's the reason for giving the user the option of disabling them.