Animated SVG: what owners actually say

Owners report broken SVG-SMIL implementations across all major browsers. Edge didn't support SVG animation in its older engine. Chrome had a massive memory leak with looping SVG animations left running for several hours. Safari historically lags on related format support.

Non-trivial SVG authoring by hand is painful, and exported SVG from authoring tools may not render correctly downstream — it's difficult to predict which features will break in different rendering engines. The SVG + CSS combination is described as clumsy, with verbose XML and inadequate CSS creating excessive mental overhead.

An animator creating art with SVG doesn't use SVG's animation facilities because they can't achieve the extremely precise effects needed. D3 is called a workaround since it animates DOM nodes but doesn't create self-contained animated SVGs, limiting use to browsers and making server-side rendering tedious.

Multiple commenters strongly oppose animated SVGs as inherently distracting, comparing them to autoplaying videos. They argue motion should never be used unless drawing the eye is the explicit goal, and that animating icons is confusing rather than helpful.

SVGs in `<img>` tags are more restricted than those in `<object>` or inline `<svg>` tags, limiting what animations and interactions work depending on how the SVG is embedded.

Owners praise short, one-shot animations as responses to user actions — e.g., an animated green checkmark on data validation, or subtle hue/shade changes on hover and click for sensory feedback.

In corporate environments where JavaScript is blocked, SVG images with CSS animations still function, making path animations and visual effects possible where other approaches fail.

Commenters note that custom animated SVGs, including dynamically generated ones, are crossing an important usability threshold and becoming practical for real applications.

A workable pipeline involves drawing in a vector tool (e.g., Illustrator, Affinity Designer on iPad), cleaning up in Inkscape, and optimizing with svgo, producing functional animated output.