Well damn, I could have sworn it worked but apparently I remembered wrong. :/ I'll redirect my gripe then towards a) why doesn't this smarter thing work and 2) why are we still using the horrible animated gif format on the internet.
Yeah, some better overall integration could help gaf on some accounts. I would
also like to have that thumbnail-thing JulianImp talked about instead of making
those long distance scrolls.
Gif, well, gif is there to stay, pretty sure about it. The reason is simple.
It's free, has the simplest de- and encoder, and the bandwidth limitation for
mobile will disappear sooner than later. Almost any other video en/decoder is
computationally more demanding (more math (some sort of cosine transformation,
use of floating-point numbers etc.)), and the better ones always come with
some copyright claims. Sure, they almost always produce better compression or
picture quality for a given byte compared to animated-gif, but they need more
backend support to make them work everywhere, whereas gif gives you are free
start (see neogaf). It just works out of the box.
My only concern with huge animated-gifs is the following. Even if there is no
bandwidth limitation, there will always be a power limitation. I think that
streaming or watching those large gifs will drain the battery much more
compared to advanced codecs streaming less data while running in hardware on a
perhaps much more power efficient budget these days. But then who watches
movies using gif? No one, I guess. But going through a discussion board with
lots of large gifs is a different story.
Anyhow. I like the gif format.
I would even like to improve it for the sake of it like having some sound
along the animation, perhaps a caption containing sound for the next frame
to be displayed. Perhaps some synthesized sounds to keep the sound data small.
I would stay with the 256 colors limit, for, image quality can still be
improved for animated-gifs when applying some of the new perceptual knowledge
we got from HDR encoding and some of the new noise shaping techniques.