With a significantly better alternative universally supported by all browsers for years, using GIFs on the web today is absurd. If you do actually want a lossle

With a significantly better alternative universally supported by all browsers for years, using GIFs on the web today is absurd. If you do actually want a lossless, auto-playing thing, the last browser to support animated PNGs (Edge) added it 2½ years ago (in the EdgeHTML → Chromium transition; I disqualify IE from being called a browser, BTW), and the fallback behaviour of showing the first frame is… well, commonly preferable, frankly. Animated images are mostly a terrible idea. (I have absolutely no idea how good APNG support is outside browsers, relative to animated GIF support.) But you should almost always use a proper video codec anyway, which are generally vastly more bandwidth- and power-efficient. (I freely admit the situation is messed up with video formats, with the only pretty-much-universally-supported codec, H.264, still being patent-encumbered. WebM is almost there now, with Safari for macOS having had it for just over a year on Safari 14.1+ and macOS 11.3+, but there’s still macOS 10.15 for a little longer and maybe Safari on iOS not supporting it (unclear), so you can’t quite go WebM. I will note incidentally that animated WebP is a thing too, and has slightly better support, back to Safari 14/macOS 11 with Safari 14 for iOS working too.)