Hacker News Reader

Lots of social media sites (like Google+) have much better gif support over things like webm. With G+, webms take like 15 seconds to open their fullscreen viewer, click play, wait for buffering, then watching it. Gifs just play right in the stream.

I'd personally love to see wider range support for animated webps, but I doubt that's going to happen for a long time, if at all.

I don't follow your comment, but I should have been more explicit:

gif is a waste of bandwidth compared to a soundless webm

Gifs work everywhere. They're heavy, but support is pretty much guaranteed. That's still not the case for webm.

If you're OK with screwing over Safari/IE users, you'll have pretty good support. You could engineer a browser-based fallback to gif, but honestly I wouldn't bother.

I'd imagine we can create an impetus to support it if we actually used it more

...and webm is a waste of CPU and memory compared to gif :-)

There are always tradeoffs.

GIFs are better on legacy browers