This is pretty big news: earlier today the WebKit team announced that iOS 10 will now support silent <video> elements with the autoplay attribute, which is a big deal for performance. Jer Noble describes the update in much more detail:
It turns out that people these days really like GIFs. But the GIF format turns out to be a very expensive way to encode animated images when compared to a modern video codec like H.264. We’ve found that GIFs can be up to twelve times as expensive in bandwidth and twice as expensive in energy use. It’s so expensive that many of the largest GIF providers have been moving away from GIFs and toward the
<video>element. Since most of these GIFs started out their lives as video clips, were converted into animated GIFs, and were again converted back to video clips, you might say that the circle is complete.
