Why are animated GIFs always in sync?
 

The pics along the left side of the this page (for instance) are loaded seperately, right?

Why is it that the animated ones that are the same are in sync?

they're the same filename. So your browser only loads them once, and then displays them everywhere they're called for at the same time.

It would be a waste of RAM to have the browser keep up with completely separate instances of the same image. Instead it has ONE instance of the gif in memory and it renders it in every spot where that image shows up on the page.

thank you, guys. One instance in memory is what I expected but I have no knowledge
of how a browser works.

It may be fun to change the name of one of the gifs and source code (link) and see what happens :-)