Super stoked about this. Much good.

How is this differentiated from webm?

"Imgur has taken what’s great about animated GIFs and modernized the format. Imgur automatically convert uploaded GIF files into MP4 video on-the-fly. The resulting .gifv will offer better quality in a smaller file size and load much faster"

Imgur is one of the biggest Gif hosts online so when they throw their weight behind something it has a big impact. Plus, increasing the base size limit to 50MB is *huge*, particularly when you consider that tumblr is still 2MB. The one drawback is that it does not auto-play on mobile (at least iOS). You have to click to activate it and then it opens it own tab. :(

Great idea since gifs are an amazing but outdated format. Too bad right now this format still doesn't autoplay and plays with "video" chrome on mobile. Hopefully the major browsers will adopt it. It would be nice if instead of adding a looping tag & autoplay tag to a html video player you could add it directly to the metadata of a mp4.

I think the limitations (color pallet, file size, etc.) on GIFs are what make gifs, gifs!! Not sure it needs engineers to fix something that isn't really broken (unless you're the one paying for the bandwidth ;)) And didn't Twitter do this a while back already?