Video, video buffering, video with broken skipping, players blocked by ad blockers, players that take ages to load and contact tons of sites, autoplaying video, video which pops out to picture-in-picture and floats over the content, video with adverts interrupting playback, video with overlays interrupting the video, video which stalls midway through, video which breaks if you leave it paused long enough for some session to timeout and it can't resume, video which often re-downloads after skipping back to an already-downloaded section, has been the opposite of a great improvement.
Twitter feeds in a browser where the videos auto-play as you scroll over them, but play without sound so you have to mute your audio, unmute the video, then restart it to catch whether you missed anything - but if you click wrong it whisks you away to load that tweet in a new page and reloads everything including the video muted again - are the worst of all worlds.
> And videos are smaller in size
Even as someone who whines a lot about efficiency and waste and bloaty websites, this is still a time I'd rather say "if gif is too big, find a way to make gif smaller, not replace them with a worse experience".
Your twitter complaints for example is completely invalid, gifs cannot play sound at all, nor can you start from beginning if you wanted to. In fact I find it very frustrating to have to wait an entire loop to wait for an instructional gif to start from scratch, with videos you can auto-play on scroll, you can pause, you can rewind, etc.
Btw. your favorite vs-code website stalls in my browser, spins up my fan and scrolls really sluggishly because of all the gifs.
Authors don't need to put ads in videos but they do. I have never seen a gif say "an error occurred, try again later" when I try to unpause it, like YouTube says several times each day for videos I paused yesterday. (inb4 "works on my machine"). Authors could replace gif frames with ads but they generally don't, and haven't done so for years.
> Your twitter complaints for example is completely invalid, gifs cannot play sound at all
Excellent. This means I a) never miss something in the audio track, because there isn't one. b) never have to take action unmute a gif. c) never have to mute music and unmute a gif and rewind it just to find out if there is audio to miss or not. d) Nobody ever says "don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell, thanks from my Patreon sponsors like xxSwagMaster, buy my merch and smash that like button" on a gif. This means gifs can't be a replacement for all video, nor am I suggesting they should be; only saying I prefer to err on the side of gif more than most people, because the experience is generally less annoying (not completely annoyance-free).
> I find it very frustrating to have to wait an entire loop to wait for an instructional gif to start from scratch
Me too. It would be neat if right click -> reload image, restarted it, or if there was a restart option in the right click menu.
> with videos you can auto-play on scroll
You can also be listening to a Twitter video, scroll it juuuust off screen, and have Twitter decide you must have gone deaf as well and pause playing. You can also no longer watch a YouTube video and lock your iPhone to keep the audio playing, like you could a few iOS versions ago. This is nothing to do with video codecs per-se, it's just part and parcel of video on the web and the companies which control it and the things people do with it to grab control and commercialise and overreach. Apparently nobody cares about gif enough to do that kind of thing with it - or it's so limited, there are fewer places to do that kind of thing.
> Btw. your favorite vs-code website stalls in my browser, spins up my fan and scrolls really sluggishly because of all the gifs.
"That thing you like, sucks" - well, different things for different people.
I wish people would pick their formats better, or the platforms that supported them offered the functionality to allow it.
Some pages have 100s of MB of gifs, it's a serious problem to users with a datacap due to some ignorant Web author