> They've offered a better experience both for post and viewing a short soundless clip than could be provided by an embedded Youtube player.
I'm not sure that's always true, as there some very noticeable problems with GIFs. Most significantly they're often huge, and must be entirely loaded to play properly, which can result in long delays before they can be viewed (usually with no obvious indication to the viewer) and massive resource usage (besides the problems related to size, animated images also usually don't benefit from the sort of acceleration and optimization that videos do). A page with a bunch of embedded GIFs (not at all uncommon), can completely kill a browser.
[There are other problems, of course, e.g. the complete lack of user control over playback, but the size of GIFs seems to be one of the worst.]
I'm not sure that's always true, as there some very noticeable problems with GIFs. Most significantly they're often huge, and must be entirely loaded to play properly, which can result in long delays before they can be viewed (usually with no obvious indication to the viewer) and massive resource usage (besides the problems related to size, animated images also usually don't benefit from the sort of acceleration and optimization that videos do). A page with a bunch of embedded GIFs (not at all uncommon), can completely kill a browser.
[There are other problems, of course, e.g. the complete lack of user control over playback, but the size of GIFs seems to be one of the worst.]