I tend to agree with you, but apparently people _really_ like GIFs, irrationally. I built a service[1] that converts GIF files to HTML5 video (h264 MP4 + OGV) and people reacted very violently, arguing that "it's not a GIF". It makes me kind of sad, but oh well. It even has a simple embedding mechanism[2].
Excellent! I had this same idea in 2011, kudos on the execution! The size difference between animated GIF and actual video codecs is vast and the idea seemed obvious. I made a quick mashup with ffmpeg+Django (I'd use Go/MongoDB for web instead of Django these days.)
HTML5 video wasn't uniformly supported across browsers (and remember Google announced Chrome would drop h.264 around that time) and I didn't get positive responses on the idea. Maybe with more tools to support HTML5 video in animated GIF use cases and educational tools showing the difference in loading times and encoding algorithms this idea could take hold.
Also the WebP engineers have developed an animated WebP format which I disagree with but could be a step toward breaking GIF's monopoly on short animations.
>HTML5 video wasn't uniformly supported across browsers
It's still the case, IMHO. For example, mobile devices are a lost battle, in my experience, when it comes to HTML5 video (with autoplay and without controls). So MC ends up serving the straight up GIF to them.
I hope animated WebP becomes a thing but I have my doubts. I'm not sure whether the three major browsers will support it to an extent that it's actually sensible to use animated webp.
It'd be nice if that would change, though. Some forum software allows you to embed video from YouTube and friends, so it wouldn't be too much of a leap to embed short video clips using the mechanism described in the MediaCrush docs. I think it's an elegant solution.
The point is not that it looks the same (although it does). The point is that videos load much, much faster than gifs. I've seen gifs converted to videos, with the video loading 30 times faster than the gif.
[1] https://mediacru.sh [2] https://mediacru.sh/docs