The browser could be regarded as the de-facto standard in absence of a more authoritative source. Just for kicks here's another version of this project using XAML Islands to load an Image control that takes care of playing the animated GIFs (it can also load a GIF from a URL). It's a twinBASIC project, I haven't translated it to VB6 just yet:

https://www.vbforums.com/showthread....=1#post5681169

It also plays the Cheers GIF from wqweto's list above as an example!