WebM is clearly a far inferior experience compared to gif on firefox: - at the start there is a stupid "fade in" effect. - the loading animation does sometimes not disappear even though the video has fully loaded. - the loading animation is generally annoying. Gifs just stop when bufffering and continue as soon as there is new data. - a useless control bar shows at the bottom on hovering. - Unlike gifs the video does…
No it's not. I'm using nightly on linux so my experience may have differed somewhat, but 90% of gifs load just as fast or slower for me. Ever since I started seeing webM videos appear online I've enjoyed them immensely more than youtube videos or gifs because of the quality and loading times (they usually start immediately), and the fact that they're usually very short which forces them to be packed with the most in-demand content, but can be longer than a gif if need be. I'd take a webM over a gif any day of the week.
edit: and I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 on a laptop with an intel core i5 and integrated graphics and not experiencing any problems, but I'm also closing the videos after I watch them. The fact that they don't pause/stop when you scroll is kind of a minor bug that can be fixed pretty easily.