That's very accusatory. I'm just trying to make a nice experience for users. As I said the GIF version would use more bandwidth, so if browsers force me to use

That's very accusatory. I'm just trying to make a nice experience for users. As I said the GIF version would use more bandwidth, so if browsers force me to use GIFs instead of an HTML5 videos it's making things worse for the user by that metric. If you want to browse an internet without images (or GIFS, or HTML5 gifs) I think you should be able to but I don't think that's what most people, including myself, want. Aside from that though video autoplaying is part of the spec. I think that browsers not following specs properly has made the web a much worse place overall. Browser incompatibility has significantly hindered the web as an application platform.