For some of you, this will probably make your whole week knowing this feature exists in Firefox and has more or less ever since the browser came into existence.
Here’s an animated GIF of an ant:
Press ESC and the animation plus any other animated GIFs will stop animating. Flash will continue to animate, but all GIFs will stop.
The only other browser that does this besides Firefox is Internet Explorer.
As old-school as animated GIFs are, they’re still used quite a bit throughout the internet and can quickly get particularly annoying when trying to read something on-screen. For you Chrome users out there, that ant above this text is annoying the sh*t out of you because it keeps taking your eye away from what you’re reading. Were you using Firefox (or, *gasp*, IE), you could stop the image animation right now with your ESC key.
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But it doesn’t work in Google Reader when reading this article. But in the real page, it does, so the issue is with Google Reader probably grabbing the key before Firefox can recognize it as a keyboard command.
I love learning new stuff! Very good bit of information to have! Thank you!
Being a Chrome user, I somehow I get the feeling that this is a follow up to the FF15 article…
Well played sir.
Internet Explorer has had this since pre-historic times. I think Netscape also did this.