How to stop animated gifs in Google Chrome?

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.

Solution 1:

Apparently there are now the

• Pause! Pause! Pause! and

• Stop animations

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

Solution 2:

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

Solution 3:

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.

Solution 4:

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

Solution 5:

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