Stopping Animated GIFs from Animating in Firefox

In Internet Explorer, you've always been able to stop animated GIFs from animating by hitting stop. In Firefox, though, the stop button is no longer available once a page loads. Hitting ESC will stop those annoying graphics from animating. Now, is it just me or did they just add this in as of 1.0.7? Can anyone confirm this?

Published September 27, 2005 · Updated September 14, 2006
Categorized as Browsers
Short URL: https://snook.ca/s/419

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8 Comments · RSS feed
1
Jeroen Mulder said on September 27, 2005

No, from what I know it's been in there since very early -- pre-1.0.

2
Justin P said on September 27, 2005

I'm on the Deer Park version and hitting ESC does cause the animation to stop. If you hit ESC before the GIF is completely loaded you'll get a "This image contains errors ..." message.

I'd rather just go into the Web Developer Extension and disable animated images instead of accidently stopping a page from loading.

3
Yannick said on September 29, 2005

I never even knew you could stop Animated GIFs from animating. Thanks for letting me know. :)

4
Michael said on September 29, 2005

Back before Flash got popular, and before Firefox and the extention Adblock, the way I would stop those annoying, blinking banners was to turn off the animated gifs in Internet Explorer.
So when I first got started with Firefox I would see the annoying banner ads on some site like Hotmail, and would try to hit the Esc button to no avail. Firefox doesn't have a "disable animated gifs" button so I actually didn't use FF until I found out about Adblock.

5
Jo said on October 28, 2005

" Hitting ESC will stop those annoying graphics from animating"

When animation is integrated in the design and is only very much in the background operating, so it is not like hey, animation is the emphasis of this design. I cannot see that one animated gif has the need of being stopeed that eagerly. But I have undoubtfully guess one is referring here to the zillion pop-ups and annoying smilies from the banner sites that have infested the internet since 1996 when itbecame that popular. For intropages, I dont mind a small animation if it is justified and integrated seemingly.

6
Jesse said on April 12, 2006

Just use go to "about:config" then find "image.animation_mode" and change it's value to "none"...

if you want it back just change the value back to "normal".

7
Heziva said on May 12, 2007

change it to 'once' if you want to show it once...

8
test said on March 11, 2011

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Sorry, comments are closed for this post. If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to send them to me directly.