How to stop animated gifs in Google Chrome?

I wish that the .gif files would only show the first frame and never do any animation.

Also, I'd like this to work automatically (i.e. having to hit Esc as in Firefox is not enough).

Is there a way of doing that in Chrome? I'm on a dev channel so I don't mind if it's an extension.

Tomas Sedovic

Posted 2009-08-17T10:56:09.913

Reputation: 1 062

It's worth mentioning that this feature would be useful because GIF heavy sites (meme sites) lag the browser. Especially on mobile. – Cole Johnson – 2014-10-02T21:38:26.120

3Actually I wish all browsers would support something like this option: stop animated gifs (and flash) by default but make it possible for the user to tell if the gif is an animated one or not, and provide a way to start the animation (or the flash) manually (maybe a clicking on the gif).

In short, stop animated gifs and flash by default but with graceful degradation.

Remote Desktop Connection users and anybody who's annoyed by seizure inducing ads would be glad to see this feature realized! – RamyenHead – 2010-03-24T06:47:37.533

This is a serious health issue for people with epilepsy. It's unacceptable that major browsers do not offer a 100% reliable bullet-proof block animation / click-to-play option for people who are vulnerable to "snow crash" attacks over twitter, etc. – Sam Watkins – 2016-12-17T12:15:56.670

You need to drop that and use Opera – random – 2011-06-17T20:06:33.037

10oh man this drives me crazy too! Why can't they support [ESC] like every other browser? – Jeff Atwood – 2009-08-31T12:36:28.617

Yeah. I'd love this to be automatic, too -- like FlashBlock. I can't think of more than five occasions where the animation actually served some (good) purpose. – Tomas Sedovic – 2009-08-31T14:45:18.677

Love uberhumor.com except for those animated GIFs posts. – Augustus Thoo – 2012-04-29T15:05:15.087

Answers

Apparently there are now the

Chrome extensions. Or perhaps the Stop gif animations on escape user script?

Jeff Atwood

Posted 2009-08-17T10:56:09.913

Reputation: 22 108

There is an issue for that in the tracker: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=3690

And a feature request in WebKit: http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23945

Afriza N. Arief

Posted 2009-08-17T10:56:09.913

Reputation: 233

You can't, basically. Not without using one of the options that require tiresome manual intervention.

"Pause Pause Pause!" stops GIF animations but is otherwise fundamentally broken -- it will, for example, get you blacklisted from Google searches due to excessive network activity or some such (I didn't debug it, but I sure got a lot of CAPTCHAs every time I tried to use Google!)

"Paused!" does not have that problem, but that seems to be largely because it doesn't actually seem to do anything at all. GIFs still animate merrily away.

This seems unlikely to change any time soon. It's already nearly two years since you asked this question, and there is still no reliable automatic solution in sight. The Chrome bug is idling because WebKit does not support the necessary features. The WebKit bug has basically not been touched since 2009. The simple fact of the matter is this: you can use Chrome, or you can stop animated GIFs automatically, but not both at once. Sorry.

went_back_to_firefox

Posted 2009-08-17T10:56:09.913

Reputation: 51

Gif Jam (Animation Stopper)

This extension worked for me. Unlike most other extensions, it permanently disables gif animation (no need to press Esc or other keys). Here is how it works:

Http request to GIF images will be intercepted and replaced with a version containing only the first frame of the image sequence.

Source code: GitHub

ks1322

Posted 2009-08-17T10:56:09.913

Reputation: 403

Some notes at the Google Chrome Help -- Flashblock for Chrome

Here is a jQuery reference for people who want to try writing their own chrome extensions.
Using jQuery to build Google Chrome extensions

nik

Posted 2009-08-17T10:56:09.913

Reputation: 50 788

5Blocking flash does nothing for animated GIFs. – kmarsh – 2009-08-17T18:34:30.520

The "Pause Pause Pause!" extension was not working for me.

So I created a fork of it called "Paused!". Comments welcome.

HRJ

Posted 2009-08-17T10:56:09.913

Reputation: 669

Not available anymore in Chrome web store? – tutejszy – 2016-05-06T08:38:54.430

went_back_to_firefox says that your extension doesn't stop animated gifs for them. – ThomasW – 2014-01-29T01:29:39.553

"gif pauser" automatically pauses gifs and animates them on hover: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gif-pauser/iejnbdgabckdhngpeckodhpobdhefgej

pikachu

Posted 2009-08-17T10:56:09.913

Reputation: 11

Not available anymore in Chrome Web Store? – tutejszy – 2016-05-06T08:39:49.170

In this article I found the Animation Policy by Google.

Sad that they haven’t bothered to update it since 2015 but I guess if it ain’t broke…

For me it still works with Chrome 74. I prefer it due to security reasons:

So the only one I’d recommend is Google’s own Animation Policy – it’s more secure and private as it only requires permission to ‘read and change your accessibility settings’ and it adds the option to display GIFs just once.

The policy is simple and it just works: