Animated Gif Viewer?
 

Is there a simple and light program that can show animated gifs and does not depend on Gnome or KDE? Image Viewer is the closest I've found, but it is kind of buggy and don't work on a lot of animated gifs, plus it doesn't even compile correctly. animate (from ImageMagick) doesn't work with transparent frames.

Image View compiles correctly on my system although Gentoo compiled it for me. In the ebuild file for Image Viewer, it includes Linux when it runs ./configure. Also it includes --disable="arch-i486, --disable="arch-i586", --disable="arch-i686", and --disable="arch-ipentiumpro". The version that Gentoo compiled is 1.2.1 of Image Viewer.

I have the same build conditions, but it fails to compile on Slackware, tried both 1.3.2 and 1.2.1. I ended up using the package provided.
However, Image Viewer doesn't work well enough, too many messed up frames or blank window that does nothing and uses up 100% of the CPU.

displaying animated GIFs
 

I previously used Viewnior to display gifanims. It worked beautifully for a long time, then mysteriously stopped recently. I tried recompiling it, but it still doesn't work. I assume some other recently installed program altered a library it was relying upon. It could take days solving this so instead I started searching for something else that could do the job.

The first thing I came up with was ImageMagick, which I already had installed. The only problem is that normal gifs are shown with the display command, whereas animgifs require animate. Both these come as part of the ImageMagick package, but I ideally wanted something that automatically displayed either formats correctly.

Next I tried gifview, which is in the gifsicle package. It works brilliantly, but for some reason the animate function is turned off by default. No problem. It's easy to set on. Just invoke it with the -a option, for example gifview -a stupidanim.gif to automatically display "stupidanim.gif" as an animated gif. Using the -a option on when viewing non-animated gifs doesn't cause any problems so I have it set up to run via a small script with the command:
gifview -a "$@"
The gifsicle package contains gifsicle, gifview, and gifdiff. It lets you create, manipulate, display, compare, and get information from gifs and gifanims and is surprisingly small.

I did find out about a few other gifanim displayers, like xanim and mirage, but I'd previously had a terrible time trying to compile xanim and after finding gifsicle's gifview I haven't bothered looking further.

I should also note that Gimp lets you display animgifs as animations. It lets you create them too, of course. There is a tutorial on the Gimp site on how to do so:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Simple_Animations/

Does it show correctly when you open it in a modern browser?

miriam-e, I love that signature! Also, thanks for the info on gif viewers.