Though there is a bookmarklet to add various controls to animated gifs at http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/ and also http://playgif.com/ (I believe the first one appeared on HN a couple of months ago)
Yeah, I've been keeping my eye on the javascript GIF scene (there are now decent decompressors and compressors), but all of the existing options are fairly expensive and don't work on older browsers / slower JavaScript engines / slower computers. At the moment swapping static thumbnails with the actual GIFs gets us a lot of benefit with little perf overhead.
Makes sense - you could also always add it as a feature, or allow for graceful degradation to the static thumbnail on the event certain feature checks fail or loading/decompression takes too long.
On a different topic; I saw you speak at General Assembly last month and didn't have a chance to thank you then. The topic (Continuous Deployment) was pretty interesting and it was nice to see how you guys are implementing that at canv.as.
