It's absolutely possible. Browsers even routinely pause playback when images aren't visible on screen.

They just don't have a proper UI and JS APIs exposed, and there's nothing stopping them from adding that.

IMO browsers are just stuck with tech debt, and maintainin a no-longer-relevant distinction between "animations" and "videos". Every supported codec should work wherever GIF/APNG work and vice versa.

It's not even a performance or complexity issue, e.g. browsers support AVIF "animations" as images, even though they're literally fully-featured AV1 videos, only wrapped in a "pretend I'm an image" metadata.

> They just don't have a proper UI and JS APIs exposed, and there's nothing stopping them from adding that.

Browsers should just allow animated gifs and apngs in <video>

More important would be to allow (silent) videos in <img>.

I wish browsers still paused all animations when the user hits the Esc key. It's hard to read when there are distracting animations all over most pages.

Browsers used to support pausing GIFs by pressing the escape key.