Was the original focus on size or performance for animated GIFs? The more you compress something, generally the more processing is required to restore it. I started using the web in the mid 90s, and animated GIFs were everywhere.
1. Allow animations in the "Hero" user profile image.
2. Make that image permanently fixed to the top of the screen on the profile page.
3. As users increased window size to see more text and less hero, the image would scale to as much as 3/4 of the screen.
4. The hero was included on the "hover card" for users and would show up in all kinds of locations throughout the service. I still have that collection....
I spent an hour or so researching "annoying gifs", and settled on a rapid red-green-blue stroboscopic rotation. I don't know the cycle time, but it was probably a few times per second.
Google eventually relented. Well, they eventually shitcanned the whole site, but that's another story.
Trying to find animated images that weren't mind-bendingly annoying to me is how I ended up with the "space alien cat" image and avatar. The original had a rotating set of astronomical images in the glasses, I eventually applied the Crab Nebula as a static fill (tried the Cat's Eye, but ironically, it didn't work particularly well). That's the hero I use at several sites (Ello, Mastodon), and is the inspiration to the avatar I use as well.
Later at another site at which gratuitous annoying gif use was prevalent, I found a few static-but-apparently-moving optical illusion images, again to make the point that annoying images are annoying. The point was somehow missed by that crowd. That site also died.
TL;DR: animated gifs and even static images can be plenty annoying.
There is a trick where subsequent frames use transparency for non-changed parts of the image which gives a much better compression ratio than you might think.
This is so horrendously inefficient it should be a crime. But it's still a GIF, and anything that can display animated GIFs can display it too.
In other words, similar to what video codecs do with "skipped macroblocks", except at a far more granular level. One wonders how efficient it would be if GIF was extended with things like motion vectors... but between the transparency/delta-enocding and the multi-palette "layering", you can sort of see the beginnings of a video codec.
I am absolutely incredulous that people choose to use a GIF over a proper video format to share video on places like Reddit in this day and age. I don't understand the motivation to do so.
Also, where have you been able to casually upload video to share quick bites like a cat making a funny face? You aren't going to upload a 12 second silent video to youtube. Up until very recently, gifs were the only permissible way to share this sort of content.
Also probably more addressable / available tools for anim gif creation.
Don't blame a web video format/standard for UI failures.
I think you don't understand the modern web. If something is crappy the user shall have it. JS was always considered crappy but now is the best new thing. And you also missed tbe latest web/UI/UX development. From the web designer point of view the user is an idiot which must be punished for every attempt to customize something.
> Don't blame a web video format/standard for UI failures.
They are not UI failures. They are done on purpose.
Video, until maybe the last 5 years, didn't.
It could have very easily been better. I'm not sure what the moral is.