[sprash]

WebM is clearly a far inferior experience compared to gif on firefox:

- at the start there is a stupid "fade in" effect.

- the loading animation does sometimes not disappear even though the video has fully loaded.

- the loading animation is generally annoying. Gifs just stop when bufffering and continue as soon as there is new data.

- a useless control bar shows at the bottom on hovering.

- Unlike gifs the video does not stop when you scroll beyond it which causes a huge amount of processor load.

[ANTSANTS]

Yeah, expanding WebMs inline is probably not the smartest idea. Someone made a video of them browsing a WebM thread in Firefox with the task manager, and Firefox swiftly growing in the gigabytes of memory usage until it ran out of address space (Firefox is still 32-bit only on Windows) and crashed. They will probably need to change the inline extension to automatically close videos after some limit has been reached.

Firefox's implementation of gifs isn't exactly sunshine and roses either. It appears to keep animating gifs in the background, even if they are in separate, not selected tabs. For one, you can see the tab icon animating pointlessly. More importantly, this uses up a surprising amount of CPU. All the time I hear my laptop's fans start whirring, and see that all of my cores are pegged at 20-40% (on a Sandy Bridge i5, mind you, not some toaster). When I realize that I have some gifs open and close those tabs, it immediately drops back down to a normal 0-2% usage idle.

[sb057]

>- at the start there is a stupid "fade in" effect.

This is only for non-embedded images. Also, I'm pretty sure this can be "fixed" with ease.

>- the loading animation does sometimes not disappear even though the video has fully loaded.

After viewing hundreds, if not thousands, of WebM files, I have never experienced this.

>- the loading animation is generally annoying. Gifs just stop when bufffering and continue as soon as there is new data.

Again, I have never seen this happen.

>- a useless control bar shows at the bottom on hovering.

Since when is being able to control playback useless?

>- Unlike gifs the video does not stop when you scroll beyond it which causes a huge amount of processor load.

Fair enough, but this will surely be implemented soon enough.

[derf_]

> Fair enough, but this will surely be implemented soon enough.

Starting in <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=963922>.

[danford]

>WebM is clearly a far inferior experience compared to gif on firefox

No it's not. I'm using nightly on linux so my experience may have differed somewhat, but 90% of gifs load just as fast or slower for me. Ever since I started seeing webM videos appear online I've enjoyed them immensely more than youtube videos or gifs because of the quality and loading times (they usually start immediately), and the fact that they're usually very short which forces them to be packed with the most in-demand content, but can be longer than a gif if need be. I'd take a webM over a gif any day of the week.

edit: and I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 on a laptop with an intel core i5 and integrated graphics and not experiencing any problems, but I'm also closing the videos after I watch them. The fact that they don't pause/stop when you scroll is kind of a minor bug that can be fixed pretty easily.

[lelandbatey]

Hey, I think that a scroll bar is a feature, not a bug. Also, I'm pretty sure now that there's finally some traction happening for HTML5 video, Firefox may now improve the experience.

I'm glad to see WebM happening.

[Cthulhu_]

Don't think that's webm specific, just firefox's implementation thereof. I do agree though, they should just play.

Not stopping is probably a feature; if it's music playing it should keep going. But it could stop rendering / taking up much cpu if not in view, I guess.

[exadeci]

Take a look at gfycat: http://gfycat.com/CheapDecisiveChipmunk 30MB gif is a 17MB video that you can pause, resize, slow up/down. No fade No loading animation No bar