[pornel]

If by intended purpose you mean animations like smileys, then yeah, it's OK.

But if you look at imgur.com or Tumblr you'll find GIF is used mostly for video clips and this results in multi-megabyte files with dreadful quality, e.g. http://ministryofgifs.org/

gfycat typically reports 15:1 compression improvement when converting to WebM.

[Titanbase]

Yeah, sometimes video formats are better, but for some purposes AnimGIFs are fine.

How difficult it seems to pick a default codec for the web+mobile web?

EDIT: Looks like everyone is concerned with it being open source, but they don't want to pay for it? Or they can pay for it and get a commercial license. Either way, you should be forced to pay! XD

[pjc50]

We refused to pay the GIF royalties and we'll continue to do so for newer formats.