Firefox used to have video controls for gifs. For some reason, now that people decided not to loop them, the controls are also gone.

Anyway, I guess I care about the controls more than about the gif.

Pssst... The IT Crowd (original, not the terrible American remake). It's delightful. You won't regret it.

I don't like this GIF but for different reasons. It started off with the focus being on him, the goth, but then the focus switched to being about her reacting to him - which was fine for a brief duration in the middle of the animation, but as you say once it stops then it remains that way, forever (until/unless you reload the page).

But one thing I do like about it is how it STOPS. As I scroll down on Lemmy, when people have GIFs, especially within usernames, that go on just literally forever, I for one find that highly distracting. And I would not want to visit a place that had just unlimited gifs scrolling unlimited-ly.

It would be better to either have a static image - which I note that when I search for the identical query terms from a desktop, I see almost all of, whereas that same search from my Android I had trouble finding even a single one that was not an animated GIF!? - or else a well-designed GIF that made its point, either looping in a manner that was not so distracting, e.g. without that sudden jerking from one frame to then wrap back to the beginning one, and/or less range of motion.

Probably what I should have done was convert it to a movie format. I had done some testing on an earlier image but forgot what worked best so would have to do all that again:-). The problem there is that someone has to actually click to start it... which might not be such a big issue, in the grand scheme of things. And then they can start, stop, rewind, fast-forward, etc. at will.

It would be so much better, I keep thinking, if our Firefox or whatever readers would implement an automatic loop-count control, like it would show a preset number of times (configurable in your settings) and then if you clicked the image or some button hovering nearby it then it could start that loop over again. But maybe as you say, if the GIF format is so horrendous then perhaps the developers actively avoid doing things to make people's lives easier if it involves keeping that format alive rather than helping to kill it dead. Plus, for good or ill, we are moving past web browsers now to app content for every single thing in the world right now it seems (I think ill, b/c that has its own considerations like security, but also as this issue brings to light, code/innovation reuse), so that even if Firefox or an Add-On or Extension or whatever were to completely solve it, the solution would not be available to most people.

On the other hand, limited usage of images - as in those that are animations should be even more limited than static ones - also increases a feeling of welcomingness in a community. Some people really dislike the giant wall of text format, others dislike anything but that (and those people can turn off images if they like?), and probably there's a huge middle ground everywhere in-between - like if someone has a filter to selectively turn off all images from e.g. gliffy or media-tenor.com or some such, but allows others.

So I have thought about this issue! And a couple of times a constrained 1-2 loops worked well... but agreed that this instance was much more of a failed experiment.