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.
Apparently there are now the
Chrome extensions. Or perhaps the Stop gif animations on escape user script?
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
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.
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
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:
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
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).
