Stop annoying animated GIFs

GIFs are fun... in small doses. Ian Paul shows how to gain some sanity amid all the animated madness

Some people find them annoying but animated GIFs can be a lot of fun, at least the first few times you see them. After that they tend to lose their appeal, especially when you’re trying to read something right next to them. Most of the major browsers don’t offer a built-in way to control them. For those who care, however, you can take control of animated GIFs on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox through the magic of add-ons and extensions.

Google Chrome

Google created its own extension, called Animation Policy (tinyurl.com/zudxr3c), to help Chrome users gain control of GIFs in their browser. Built as an accessibility extension, Animation Policy lets you choose between allowing animated images, allowing them just a single occurrence, or disabling them altogether. Once you’ve installed the extension from the Chrome Web Store, click on the lightning bolt icon that appears to the right of the address bar. Now just choose which option you’d prefer. Personally, we’d opt for allowing the animation to run once. That way you get the joy of animated GIFs without the annoyance.

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox has an even better add-on for stopping animated GIFs, called ESCape From Them GIFs (tinyurl.com/ho7vcvd). All you do is install it from Mozilla’s add-on catalogue and restart your browser. The next time you’re tired of seeing a GIF on a web page, hit Esc on your keyboard and the GIF stops. This includes every GIF on a web page. Even a page filled with animated GIFs, such as Giphy, will stop with one key press. Hit Esc again and the GIFs start moving again.

Internet Explorer/Edge

Users can turn off GIFs completely by going to Internet options > Advanced and unchecking Play animations in web pages. Once you restart your PC, IE stops playing GIFs. Edge, Microsoft’s newest browser, currently doesn’t have a way to stop GIFs, but maybe someone will make a browser extension for it in the future.