Stop animated images in FireFox / Tor browser / Chrome

[suchmoon]

Update: forum no longer allows new animated PNG avatars, existing ones still remain.


Ok, I've had it with the animated avatar ads... so if you're irritated like me and don't mind missing out on an occasional meme here's how you disable them in FireFox / Tor:

Open a new tab and enter about:config in the address field. Confirm the grave warning that shows up. Search for "animation" and change the value of image.animation_mode to "none" to disable all animations, or to "once" to let them play one time (thanks to o_e_l_e_o for the tip).


Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image


Solution for Chrome:

For Google Chrome.

Animation Policy.
Author: Google Accessibility.

Run animations only once, or disable animation completely.
Disable image animation, or make animations run only once.

Works on all animated image formats and animated SVG. Does not affect video.

[DeathAngel]

suchmoon, you’re such a party pooper
Memes are great, they bring the forum to life, especially during a bull run in the WO thread. I respect your decision though

[suchmoon]

Just to clarify - I abhor the animated avatar ads. Nothing against memes or the WO hat gang. But when I open a thread and the entire left side of the page is having a seizure it annoys me.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I have this particular setting set to "once" rather than "none". It will play any gif through once, and then freeze it on the last frame. This means all the animated avatars and what have you are rapidly frozen, but if there is an actual shared gif, I can still watch it. If the gif has already played by the time I scroll down to it, I just have to refresh the page and it will play again. Best of both worlds.

[DdmrDdmr]

I dislike those animated avatars in general, and find them rather annoying, to the point that I have a few people on ignore just to avoid seeing a 2-3 second loops over and over again. It's distracting, and does not align with the attempt to have a steady read through posts on the forum.

I just tried o_e_l_e_o's idea and set the parameter to "once" instead of "none" and it works like a charm so far.

[theymos]

Animated avatars aren't supposed to be allowed, but I never got around to adding detection for the APNG ones. I'll look into it.

[o_e_l_e_o]

These animated .png avatars have certainly become more obvious over the past few days since the Stake.com bounty campaign started paying anyone for any old spam with no max post limit, even with animation_mode set to "once". As suchmoon has said, it must be very distracting having the entire left side of the page play that nonsense over and over.

On a somewhat related note, another pet peeve of mine is autoplaying videos on various webpages. While a good pop up blocker will block many, some inevitably slip through. If you change "media.autoplay.default" from 0 to 1, videos won't play until you click on them.

[Xal0lex]

For Google Chrome.

Animation Policy.
Author: Google Accessibility.

Run animations only once, or disable animation completely.
Disable image animation, or make animations run only once.

Works on all animated image formats and animated SVG. Does not affect video.

[LoyceV]

These animated .png avatars have certainly become more obvious over the past few days since the Stake.com bounty campaign started paying anyone for any old spam

I've been using set "image.animation_mode" in Firefox to "once" for as long as I can remember, but the Stake avatars are still annoying. They animate too long for each round, and (combined with the massive spam it causes) that still creates long lists of animations on my screen.

Animated avatars aren't supposed to be allowed, but I never got around to adding detection for the APNG ones. I'll look into it.

I'd love to see this fixed

[hugeblack]

For Google Chrome.

Chrome users should always download extensions to get these benefits.
I've been using this add-on for some time but you've been ahead of me posting it.

Animated avatars aren't supposed to be allowed, but I never got around to adding detection for the APNG ones. I'll look into it.

APNG have a "acTL" chunk in them. So, if you search for the string acTL (or, in hex, 61 63 54 4C (the 4 bytes before the chunk marker (i.e. 00 00 00 08) are the size of the chunk in big endian format, without counting the size, marker, or CRC32 at the end of the field)) you should be pretty good. To get it even better, check that this chunk appears before the first occurrence of the "IDAT" chunk (just look for IDAT).

http://foone.org/apng/identify_apng.php

[theymos]

OK, APNGs are now detected. Old ones are grandfathered for now, in part because people have ongoing campaigns, but in the future I might (or might not) go through and remove them.

[Vod]

I tried to make mine as subtle as possible so it wouldn't annoy.

Thanks ibminer! 

[suchmoon]

I tried to make mine as subtle as possible so it wouldn't annoy.

Thanks ibminer! 

LOL, yours should be protected as a historic landmark

[El duderino_]

Meh, just make it easy..... allow nothing and obligate everybody to wear A XhomerX hat

We all love rules to follow and centralized avatars

And comrade XhomerX Will not be out of work