Stop Animated Images in a Browser

Have you ever wanted to disable those annoying images on web pages, especially the ones with excessive movement that never ends? You can easily disable those animations in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer (MacOS X's Safari does not let users disable GIF animations). This guide will show you how to disable all of those animated GIFs, so that you'll see only the first frame of each image instead.

Steps

Mozilla Firefox

  1. Open a new tab or window in the browser.
  2. Type "about:config" in the address text area of the navigation bar.
  3. Press [Enter] or click on the "Go to..." button.
  4. Type "animation" in the "Filter:" text area.
  5. Press [Enter].
  6. Double-click on the "image.animation_mode" listing.
  7. Type "none" in the text box that appears (it will be set to "normal" by default).
  8. Press [Enter] or click on the "OK" button.

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Method 1

  1. Open Internet Options from either the Control Panel (Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Internet Options), or from Internet Explorer (version 7: Tools -> Internet Options).
  2. Click on the Advanced tab.
  3. Scroll down to the Multimedia category.
  4. Remove the check from the Play animations in webpages option.
  5. Click the "OK" button.

Method 2

  1. Let the webpage load.
  2. Press 'Esc' on your keyboard. This will stop all the animated images in a page.

Opera

  1. Press [F12].
  2. Remove the check from the "Enable GIF/SVG animation" option.

Tips

  • You can also stop all already-loaded GIF animations by clicking on the "Stop" button, or by pressing [Esc]. This works on many browsers but has been pulled from Firefox.
  • If the animation is part of an Adobe Flash file, and you're using Firefox, download the "FlashBlock" add-on (flashblock.mozdev.org)to stop Flash files from loading automatically.

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Sources and Citations