Unless you're willing to backport that support to 10+ year old browsers, it will never happen. You need UNIVERSAL support. Edge cases, corner cases, and plain old "bad ideas" included. This is what the incumbent has going for it.
The polyfill principle addresses this. As long as transparent fallbacks exist, there's no reason new technology can't be rolled out for the benefit of the significant userbase that can take advantage of it.
Anyone who cares about their data bill should be asking very serious questions about why we're still stuck with the massively inefficient 32-year-old GIF format as the only widely supported way to display an inline animation, especially as many superior alternatives like FLIF, BPG, etc. have been released over the last several years.
GIFs waste absolutely ungodly quantities of bandwidth. Any semi-modern video codec is at least an order of magnitude more efficient. Any way you slice it, the continued dominance of GIF is, at best, an egregious oversight, and it has a direct dollar impact on anyone with a metered connection (this is your phone, but increasingly likely to be your home connection too).
As a community, we need to make an alternative to GIF a real priority.
