So, as of now the solution for displaying animated gifs is to pre-process and split the gif into ... individual gifs or any other format. It is sensible that processing doesn't handle the animated part of a gif in the simple loadimage, and a "special" loadAnimimage would be overkill.

So, I propose a small library that knows how animated gifs work and returns an array of 1.)InputStreams that can be fed into loadImage(InputStream) to get the individual .gif frames (the inputStream could be in raw bmp format or .gif format) and then also an array (or combined through OOP) of the MS count that each frame should show (I've found many browsers ignore the requested framerate of some gifs...)

Anyway, having real-time animated gif support is a must for people trying to create a "page window" in processing to mimic HTML / WebPage support, and would just in general facilitate animation in processing, where an animated gif can become very compressed by "sharing pixels" between frames.