I find animated images really annoying and distracting and always hit STOP immediately to make them stop animating (which doesn't work yet in mozilla -- separate bug). I would dearly love a pref which would make animated images display only the first frame, or not display at all (just an alt tag), or, better still, don't download them (perhaps abort the download of an image as soon as it's detected to be animated). This feature would encourage me to switch to mozilla for all my browsing even if it wasn't quite polished in other areas. I've heard similar sentiments from other people.

Yep. I think this feature would make many people happy. Thanks for submitting it. -p

As long as I'm requesting stuff, how about something in the View menu (perhaps just use View->Show Images) to make the images on the current page animate, if they're currently stopped?

spam: added self to cc list as this might affect my realm.

noise: adding self to cc-list, as I may take a stab at it.

*** Bug 31978 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Beware boog#18754. This might make animated PNGs available, too.

From 31978: "It'd be nice to have a pref that would put a bound on "infinite" so animated gifs would stop automatically after the specified time. At least on Unix, older versions of the browser used a lot of CPU cycles for animations even when the window was covered or minimized."

*** Bug 32513 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Marking dependent on the implementation bug 33810.

Wouldn't this bug be a duplicate of #17686?

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 17686 ***

Verified duplicate.