For those that remember the early days of the internet, we can remember a time full of hideous constantly looping gifs polluting the webpages.

A few years later the use of animated gifs was severely frowned upon. They made websites look cheap and unprofessional.

By 2010 they had all but gone, only appearing on pages still lurking from the late 90's or adorning the borders of the Mad cat lady's blog.

But in the last years I've seen them coming back.

webm's are the new gifs

Bouncing boobs are always popular.

I thought you meant animated avatar gifs.

I never used them when they were popular and I feel like I missed out so I for one and glad to see the comeback.

I don't think you're likely to find them as part of any serious site's layout (aside from maybe the aforementioned bouncing boobs in porn sites), but I don't think they ever stopped being popular in terms of user generated content- facebook posts, imgur links, etc.
Is that where you're seeing them?

What's wrong with gifs ?

<Not Safe For Work>http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b398/heat_fusion/600full-hitomi-tanaka.gif</Not Safe For Work>

Hmmm... some of the gifs can be pretty crazy, however I've seen some sites limit the size of the avatar to 50k, severely limiting the craziness. Often due to that they are short & stylized rather than animated video. Greatly limits me when I'm trying to make something funny and is longer than 10 frames, but still workable with a little know how and experimentation.

Wow, talk about an old - if mesmerizing - gif!! Unfortunately, time took its toll on her...

To be honest I've mostly seen them on the click-bait sites my wife visits and peoples posts on her facebook.
But they didn't used to be so prevalent.

Its just every time I catch her screen there is 2 or 3 animated gifs.

Just makes me glad I only do Anti-social media.

Proves my point! :)

Social networks and internet forums popularized animated GIFs. Avatars, memes, funny images, reaction images and etc... For example, some gamers use webm and gif files to share their gaming moments (this is very common in websites like Reddit).

increases in bandwidth capacity as well processing power means the gifs can contain more frames and better quality and still load almost instantly.

testament to the format. well designed.

Gifs are awesome.

That's the best answer.

Some of us still have terrible internet however, the resurgence of GIFs sometimes makes me think i'm back on a dial-up modem.