[jbermudes]

As someone who grew up in the 90s where GIFs became popular for their use in looping animations, I don't understand why these files became popular for this kind of use case of step-wise instructional material (or even worse, as general-purpose video containers). Sure they may be more lightweight than videos, but isn't it frustrating to miss a step and have to wait for the entire GIF to loop all over again? This can happen especially with tutorials that use GIFs sprinkled throughout. By the time you scroll to them you end up halfway through the animation or aren't sure what step you're at and how long you need to wait for the repeat.

Maybe this is more of a browser-issue and if we're going to embrace abusing GIFs as video containers perhaps browser vendors should give the user video player-style controls?

[garblegarble]

At least one image hosting site[1] is going in the opposite direction, converting GIFs to H.264 videos to save bandwidth and CPU time. They don't show playback controls - although (in Chrome, at least) you can right-click and enable controls.

1: https://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/