Well, it was 3000 years ago. Even if the format permitted multiframe content, a lot of the decoders dealt poorly with the additional frames (or just ignored them) most websites didn’t seem to make good use of them.
I think the GIF89 standard is when they became popular, regrettably coinciding with the sudden popularity of animated “website under construction” images. 
Unfortunately, when I think of animated GIFs, the first thing I think of is stuff like this and the “animated flair” or whatever you want to call it, of the mid-90s and somewhat beyond (multimedia WWW sites didn’t really take off until I think around 1994, right? Mosaic and all that? Though there was Compuserve and Prodigy and stuff like that.)
Surely the Hamster Dance makes up for it.
GIF at this point just means a short, usually looping animated image. It doesn’t even have to be in the GIF format, as many are now coded using modern video formats.
Static GIFs are rather uncommon since PNG is better in all respects, and is widely available. The only exception I’ve found is with tiny 16x16 images where the PNG overhead can make it slightly larger.
But that is the term I would use for them. Static GIF, or possibly “in the GIF file format.” (Yes, with the redundancy, because the original meaning of acronyms tends to be forgotten.)
I’ve always interpreted ‘gif’ as being animated for as long as I can remember. I’m 39.
LOL!
Choosy graphic artists choose GIF.
Real conversation, too. I was unaware she was aware of the debate, which I thought was long in the rearview mirror, despite being a “JIF” proponent.
There is no right answer. It can be jif or gif as in Gifford.
Both are correct. People get way too invested in silliness like this.
But there are right answers, they just happen to be either, depending on where you’re coming from. “JIF” is how the creator of the format intended it to be pronounced. “GHIFF” is what most people say. You could say proscriptively the former is correct, but descriptively the latter is correct.
That’s “Hampster Dance”.
Steve Wilhite and the guys at CompuServe who actually created the format intended it to be prounced like the peanut butter, often saying “choosy developers choose GIF”.
People can ignore that all they want, but it’s still the “correct” pronunciation.
Hey, I know that and as I said, I say jif. Well not the names, but that they said jif.
But either is considered correct and no arguments should be treated seriously over which is right when both are.
Oh, I say jif just because when I first saw the extension I just started thinking of them as jifs.
Yeah, I know. You pronounce it correctly. 
And I never said this was a serious argument. 
To actually answer the OP, GIF to me means that it can be either animated or static. But I also know that it’s pretty much only used for animated stuff these days, so I’m not surprised or confused if people use it that way.
Yes. I have some of them on my computer drive to this day, and use them for certain purposes.
And a big part of this for the less computer-oriented among the younger generation is simple labelling.
Many smartphones have a built in “GIFs” library in the native text message application, right next to the emoji library, and they are all animated. Likewise with social media apps like Instagram, Twitter, etc. the name GIF is incorporated into the UX.
~Max
I do think it’s amusing, from a linguistics perspective, that this debate is even possible. For almost all of human history, new coinages were always spoken, and thus there could be no dispute over a word’s pronunciation, though there might be dispute over its spelling. Now, though, with words like “gif” and “pwn”, we’re seeing new words coined and/or spread primarily through a text format, and the spelling is hence set in stone, but the pronunciation can be ambiguous.
Not sure I qualify as young, since I already past a half century.
Microsoft Teams gives me the option to add an emoji, GIF or sticker. All of the GIFs (which I pronounce with a hard g) are animated. Originally GIF might have meant a static picture, but now I would use GIF to refer to an animated GIF.
I blame Microsoft for the confusion. All of it.
I was taught to use GIF for vector images, and JPEG for raster images, PNG for transparency. All about file size back in the day. I also cut my teeth in the dev world on Flash.
As said above, SVG is vastly superior for vectors these days.
Thing is, PNG has a 256-color mode that works just like GIF, only more efficient. Any static GIF could be converted to PNG with a smaller file size with no loss of quality. In the early days, Wikipedia was converting all its starix GIFs to PNG.
For actual vector art, the predecessor to SVG was basically PostScript or PDF, or one of several proprietary formats for specific programs, e.g. Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw.
GIFs and PNG always been raster images. So you’d only use them to export your vector art.
Unless there is some odd variant of the GIF format that I don’t know about, this seems sus to me.
One chunk of advice I have seen (and agree with) is GIF/PNG for (raster) images with sharp edges like icons/signage, and JPEG for photographs. JPEG compression is not very efficient and/or creates visual artefacts when it tries to compress a sharp edge.
And as BigT notes, for static images everything GIF does, PNG does better.