Partial moon over Gothenburg

Continuing our experiments with GIF animations, I’m surprised by how crap the gif support is in Photoshop. And on Mac, there aren’t any alternatives for files larger than 100×100 px or so. Also, export for web seems to gunk up the cache; Files no larger than five megabytes crash the app, and each rendering takes a minute or two. Are there any good alternatives? Something as flexible as PS but faster (or, y’know, actually working) and maybe with a few more dithering options would be awesome. GIF is the most ubiquitous format for Internet animations, and it’s just too darn fun to play with not to use.