Dear Geek,
There is a website that I need to use for work, but unfortunately, it looks like a 7 year old child made the page. There are these flashing GIFs all over the place, and I find them distracting and annoying. I know this is someone else’s website, but other than emailing the author of the website to take those pictures down, is there anything I can do to stop them from flashing?
Sincerely,
Annoyed.
Dear Annoyed,
There is a way to turn off animated GIFs in your internet browser. This will not work for Flash or Java animations, but just GIFs. Because there are multiple internet browsers, there are a few ways to turn the animated GIFs off.
In the Internet Explorer menu bar, click on Tools and then Options. In the Internet Options window that opens, click on the Advanced tab, then scroll down about half way and find the option for Play animations in webpages. Uncheck the box next to this option and click the OK button. Close and restart the browser for the setting change to take effect.
In the Firefox address bar, type about:config. Click the I’ll be careful, I promise button. In the Filter bar, type image, then find the entry for image.animation_mode. Double-click this option and set the value to none in the pop-up window and click the OK button. Close and restart Firefox for the setting change to take effect.
At this time, there is no option for turning off animated GIFs in Google Chrome. Several people have developed extensions (add-ons) that can sometimes “pause” the animated GIFs, but they do not turn off the animated completely.
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