Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can simply save the file and expect it to work everywhere I don't quite follow. This is because the gif is decoded and played. No different than a video. You don't need a proprietary player to loop a video, you just go back to the start of the video. For streaming, this is only problematic for large videos that can't be cached, but the same applies to large gifs. Browsers can loop video, it's just a right-click…
Video isn't superior for sharable, loopable images. Try downloading a video from a popular social network. Can you easily do it without inspecting the source? If it's a two second clip, does it loop on your system? Or does the video player exit / end the stream? This is absolutely a problem that GIF doesn't have. > You don't need a proprietary player to loop a video > You can save any video file just like a gif. Exce…
That's the site's decision. You also cannot easily download images from Twitter if there are more than one in a tweet for example. On Instagram it is blocked all in all.