Sorry but no. Jif is what i said back then, and what i will say until i die. All the people i know have been calling it jif like "giraffe" and we will forever call it that. But if someone called it hard g gif i can understand what they are talking about just fine and i would literally pay 0 attention to it. Have better things to do. abcdef...gif.
Yeah I took digital art classes in the 90s and the teacher and all the students pronounced it jif. I never heard the hard g until that dumb YouTube video.
The article cites the opinion of an unnamed author of an unnamed "image encyclopedia." Not really what I'd call definitive, which was the point.
In my circles back then, soft G was predominant. I wouldn't cite that as evidence of a One True Pronunciation either.
There has always been debate about it. Hard G has certainly become predominant, but declaring that people that prefer soft G "weren't on the internet back then" is revisionist at best.
And it would be incorrect. The point is there are multiple ways to pronounce G in English, none more valid than the other. Heck, how do you pronounce G itself?
Where the fuck did I find someone in real life to talk to about image formats? I always thought it was j. I can't even recall any conversations about it until the 2010s.