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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
KERR
Making moves

Yes please! MS Teams does this well - GIFs play 3 times then stop, and you also get a play/pause button. In FF if I keep a tab open with GIFs mindlessly playing endlessly, it will impact battery life/CPU.

batata
Strollin' around

It would improve performances on mobile as well. 👍

foxfree99
Making moves

I want to block every single thing that moves, scrolls, blinks, flashes, plays, shouts or otherwise makes video or audio motion UNLESS I explicitly click on a thing to activate it.  No distractions.

nytimes.com and other news sites have video feeds embedded in their home page that do not have visible controls --not ads, but their own content, so adblockers don't help--and images on constant slideshow modes that change and change and change.

many websites have textscroll elements (click here now to subscribe! click here for special deals!)

Blogsites have 'holiday' themes that result in a 'snowflakes' moving down the screen.

Why is there not a universal movement blocker that prevents all this stuff unless I explicitly click on something to allow it?

And:  how can I kill 'textscroll' elements?  No amount of autoplay block seems to work on that, and 'textscroll' search in about:config brings up nothing to adjust.  I do not want to block all 'scroll' items because I want my usual scrolling options to be smooth and natural for when I am deliberately scrolling content, or want a box like the one where I am entering this text to naturally move up and show me the line I am entering without my having to scroll up for that.

jscher2000
Leader

The web standards people have created a standard way for sites to detect that a user wants the minimum amount of animation: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion 

However, if a site doesn't check or doesn't care, then the browser will render the page as instructed. It would be a good idea to have some kind of further restriction in the browser, although it surely will be complicated to implement and may involve many separate changes.

You may want to submit an "idea" in the Ideas section. I suspect these discussions will kind of scroll away.

jscher2000
Leader

On some sites, you may be able to use Reader View: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages 

MintMain21
Familiar face

You could probably use an extension like uBlock Origin to enforce strictly the "block everything" prerogative you want.

KERR
Making moves
KERR
Making moves

2 more suggestions:

 

Nich
Making moves

Add to the settings, the option to disable browser animations.

Status changed to: Trending idea
Jon
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hey all,

Here with an exciting update…

Your idea has been upgraded to the status of “Trending idea.” This means it’s now one step closer to reaching our internal teams for review—learn more about The Idea Journey.

Please keep the conversation going (the more details, the better) and stay tuned for updates 😃

-The Community Team