I have noticed that in Windows 7, the Windows Picture viewer only displays the first frame of an animated GIF. Why is this? I can see the same picture animated in a web browser.

considering that gifs are the only animated picture file type I am going to go out on a limb and say for it, it is the ONLY option! The point is that is has been there for many many years and all of a sudden you decide for us that we no longer need it, it is not something for you to decide. it is not an upgrade if you remove features that the people have been using for years, it is a downgrade when you remove features. Like having to edit the registry now to change the default icon for a file type, what is with that? Give us back all the the features you removed! I have had to download 3rd party software for almost everything! why even bother with the OS if I need 3rd party software to make it DO anything useful. Next time I am going with Unbutu. Responses like this are the last straw you people obviously don't care about what your customers want.

.apng (animated png) is another animated picture file type. i do find it extremely stupid that pre-existing OS supported animated .gif just fine. I was even able to make one my desktop wallpaper, but now with 7, it becomes static? yes the pixels are quite primitive compared to its more widely used .jpg and .png, but how is it not widely used? Honestly, It shouldn't be that hard to integrate functional .gif into windows 7, which has been working perfect for the past decade or so, and it's not all that time consuming. Why you even left it out in the first place fazes me into thinking that this is a brain-fart moment for the development staff, or whatever the technical title is.

They were going to make it a payware feature probably... This is kind of close bye the way: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/About-Windows-DreamScene And it does happen to be "ultimate exclusive".