[Zababa]

> Of course, the typical rebuttal on HN will be "I hate autoplay, nothing should autoplay without an explicit click", which is why we'll be stuck with GIF for another 10 years.

Why? If you believe nothing should autoplay GIFs are also part of the problem.

[chrismorgan]

Absolutely; I consider GIFs autoplaying to be a bug—unfortunately a bug that would be rather difficult to fix.

[idoubtit]

It's easy to fix with the right browser. For instance with the Chromium-based Vivaldi, I configured "Image Animation" to "Once", with the other possible values being "Loop" and "Never". You may define a shortcut key to change this setting on the fly.

[chrismorgan]

That doesn’t fix undesired animated image autoplay, it breaks animated images completely, since you can’t trigger playback on demand like you can with videos.

[rhdunn]

I personally find animated gifs on things like YouTube community posts visually distracting, as my eyes will continually move to look at what is moving. That's also why I turn off things like the moving tile images on the Windows start menu.