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Šime
Making moves
Status: Trending idea

Today’s Mozilla Hacks article “A new year, a new MDN” includes several animated GIF images. These GIFs play automatically and loop infinitely (right?), and Firefox provides no way to pause them. This is a problem for some people. At the very least, it can be distracting.

There are multiple ways Mozilla can mitigate this issue, but the one feature that I’d like to see most is an option in Firefox that would stop all animated GIFs from auto-playing and instead make them click-to-play. For example, there could be a small play/pause button in the corner of the image.

Of course, websites should stop using GIFs and start using <video>, but many websites don’t. For example, Mozilla Hacks. GIFs are going to stick around for another decade.

18 Comments
BugMeNot
Strollin' around

Hello, good morning, afternoon or evening...

I'll go straight to the point...

Animated gifs animate if you move your mouse pointer over them

how does Discord do it, ¿eh?

 

The idea as described in the title is to limit gif animations thus reducing CPU usage, since when I'm on messenger (facebook) all the gifs are reproduced cloak and dagger and my old intel celeron 847 can't handle this, so... or the memory collapses or the browser hangs.

 

Its easy... adding it would be very useful and so... my pc will not explode XD

I would appreciate it much!!!

 

Add an option in the advanced preferences (about:config) "image.animation_mode" say something like "on hover" or similar.

 

In case if can't distinguish between images that are gifs and those that aren't (so as not to be mousing all over the web like an idiot), add an distinctive... like Discord does, too

Thanks you for read 😄

daisywreath
New member

A click-to-play animations setting would be hugely helpful. I need to be able to limit animations because a lot of movement on the screen can trigger and/or worsen migraines for me. I currently have to manually alternate between having image.animation_mode set to once (when I'm having fewer issues) and none (when I'm finding animations to be really problematic) but it's inconvenient to switch back and forth. Keeping it set on none all the time isn't a good solution for me because there are times when I need to be able to play the animation because it contained relevant content rather than just being a filler image.

KERR
Making moves

I'm thinking this could be a setting with 3 options:

  • Play GIFs X times only (with a "play" button to restart them) - default. Same as MS Teams
  • Play GIFs endlessly (warning, this may impact CPU/battery). Same as current Firefox implementation
  • Play GIFs on demand only. Extreme, but useful to some people I'm sure
davemc_5485
New member

Sometimes I don't even want to see the gif at all.  Right click image gives open in new tab, save as,  copy, copy link, email, inspect etc, but not block or hide.

I may wish to read a page that has one disruptive image.

Adding a hide image or mask image might be a related task to stop image autoplay.

Yukulélé
Strollin' around

As an alternative, I suggest adding a "show controls" toggle option on gif right-click.

This will show gif controls (play, pause, seek, loop, speed) as it does for video.

xrvs
New member

I second this idea. Additionally, animated PNG and WEBP should also be controlled similarly.

gltch
Making moves

disagree, it should be something like "Add option to make animated images click-to-play" since there isn't only gif 🙂

(luckily there is already something for Audio and Video Playback "Block Audio and Video" <3)

+1, performance could skyrocketing (dis even a word?)
it also could make some sites more bearable, thos who playin' random animated images to get your whole attention span..

clepsydrae
New member

+1 to everything, but it would be great to do as Yukulélé says and implement real controls.

I.e. the functionality of JSGIF should be in every browser, IMO: https://slbkbs.org/jsgif/

We use gifs as animations, but provide none of the control we typically demand for animations (play, pause, forward/back a frame, etc.) It's a real hole in the functionality.