Every single gif on that page loaded instantly for me. Chrome inspector says it took 300ms to load this gif: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--6Z2c_2K...

When I paste that in an incognito window it displays and plays instantly.

300ms is a good target for a page load, not for a pointless animation. And that's a 3MB gif. The page also contains a 2.6MB one, two 6+MB ones and one over 7MB. The entire page is over 30MB. Scrolling through it takes the sort of bandwidth typically used for a high quality streaming movie. At 1 to 2 MB/sec you can easily miss something is an animation in the first place because it won't have time to load. Of course, you're not really missing anything other than a low-fps repeated distraction you can't choose to start or stop. This is a good user experience the way a fresh pile of manure is warm shelter.

All true, but those aren't necessarily problems with the concept of a gif, and could be fixed with another format, that isn't necessarily a full on video.

I think the concept of gif's is fairly great, but the actual format itself has tons of issues.

It seems to be covered adequately by formats supported by current browsers. Try pasting a link to a gif in Facebook. Facebook will convert it to an mp4 and put a big 'GIF' button on top of it. This doesn't seem to bother or be noticed by (statistically) anybody.

Try replacing those with videos and stand back as the CPU fan spools up at full power.

With non-flash videos? Hasn't been my experience under OS X, at least. Tiny gifv videos just play. 1080p, 60p video doesn't turn on the fans.

A dozen imgur tabs with a single gifv each have caused me notable background CPU use in Firefox. A dozen tabs with gifs in them don't.

That doesn't really count. A dozen tabs in Firefox might also give you a rash, the solution is to probably stop using Firefox not to convert videos to gifs.

That's not a fair comparison with gif/apng if the thing can pick between webm or mp4 to get hardware acceleration and start/stop off-screen videos.

Why is it not a fair comparison? A page full of gifs in a browser gobbles bandwidth, can't be interrupted, eats lots of cpu. A page full of gifvs doesn't have any of these problems. One of these is a lousy user experience, the other one is not. I don't have to make both of these things a shitty user experience just so the comparison is 'fair'.