Screen recordings on a Mac and clips from an iPhone are MOV files. Turning a few seconds of one into a GIF is the quickest way to show a bug, a gesture or a reaction inline in a chat, a pull request or a document. GIF has no sound and is limited to 256 colours, so keep clips short.
The defaults suit most files. Under Options you can set the frame rate, set the width and trim the start and end. This is demanding work for a browser: a long or high-resolution file can take several minutes, and your device does all of it, so keep the tab open.
The conversion uses your browser's own video and audio codecs (WebCodecs), with hardware acceleration where the device has it; the file is read from disk as it goes and can be up to 2 GB. Where the browser lacks a codec, the page falls back to the compatibility engine. A GIF covers at most 30 seconds, counted from the start point you set under Options (the beginning of the video by default), so a longer clip is cut there. The defaults are 12 frames per second and 480 pixels wide, which keeps the file a sensible size.