How to stop animated gifs in Google Chrome?

"Apparently there are now the

Pause! Pause! Pause! and
Stop animations

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

"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."

"The ""Pause Pause Pause!"" extension was not working for me.

So I created a fork of it called ""Paused!"". Comments welcome."

"In this article I found the Animation Policy by Google.

Sad that they haven’t bothered to update it since 2015 but I guess if it ain’t broke…

For me it still works with Chrome 74. I prefer it due to security reasons:

So the only one I’d recommend is Google’s own Animation Policy – it’s more secure and private as it only requires permission to ‘read and change your accessibility settings’ and it adds the option to display GIFs just once.

The policy is simple and it just works:"

"gif pauser" automatically pauses gifs and animates them on hover: chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gif-pauser/iejnbdgabckdhngpeckodhpobdhefgej