How to stop animated gifs in Google Chrome?

Question

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.

oh man this drives me crazy too! Why can't they support [ESC] like every other browser? — Jeff Atwood, Aug 31 '09 at 12:36
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, Aug 31 '09 at 14:45
Actually 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, Mar 24 '10 at 06:47
It's worth mentioning that this feature would be useful because GIF heavy sites (meme sites) lag the browser. _Especially_ on mobile. — Cole Tobin, Oct 02 '14 at 21:38
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, Dec 17 '16 at 12:15

score 31 · Accepted Answer · edited May 06 '16 at 08:58

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Apparently there are now the

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

edited May 06 '16 at 08:58

tutejszy

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answered Sep 16 '10 at 10:30

Jeff Atwood

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The Stop Animations extension still exists, and still works - you have to hit Esc to enable and Esc againt before scrolling because of how it works by taking a screenshot. – RichVel Nov 30 '21 at 09:24

score 8 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 17 '11 at 20:07

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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

edited Jun 17 '11 at 20:07

Jeff Atwood

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answered Sep 17 '10 at 01:59

Afriza N. Arief

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score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 24 '11 at 02:37

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.

score 5 · Answer 4 · edited Dec 21 '14 at 19:24

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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

edited Dec 21 '14 at 19:24

Vinayak

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answered Dec 22 '13 at 12:28

ks1322

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Philipp Stauss · Answer 5 · 2019-05-01T09:41:53.200

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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:

edited May 01 '19 at 09:41

answered May 01 '19 at 09:10

Philipp Stauss

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Why has this been removed from chrome :( – djsmiley2kStaysInside Sep 19 '20 at 21:55
@djsmiley2kStaysInside Now it is available in Chrome. – Alexei Feb 05 '21 at 14:56
I look forward to turning this back on \o/ I raised a bug for it, figured it'd get ignored but maybe it was genuinely removed by accident then. :O – djsmiley2kStaysInside Feb 05 '21 at 15:13

nik · Answer 6 · 2009-08-17T11:10:34.743

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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

edited Aug 17 '09 at 11:10

answered Aug 17 '09 at 11:01

nik

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Blocking flash does nothing for animated GIFs. – kmarsh Aug 17 '09 at 18:34

score 0 · Answer 7 · edited Aug 17 '13 at 22:04

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One possible Way to stop gif animation is to press Alt+Spacebar, Esc to remove dropdown menu, Alt to resume.

Seems to work in the Google Chrome browser (Version 28.0.1500.95 m) (Windows XP) (08/16/2013).

edited Aug 17 '13 at 22:04

Jawa

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answered Aug 17 '13 at 19:03

Dr. Dennis Bogdan

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this did not work at all for me in Chrome 40.. – Jeff Atwood Jan 22 '15 at 12:40

How to stop animated gifs in Google Chrome?

7 Answers7

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