Firefox eats my CPU like I eat ribs

[jc-8FIgwK2HfyJMuWfdjsoA/w at public.gmane.org (John Chambers)]

#To: <discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org> (Tom Metro)
| It's always been a pet peeve of mine that Firefox - an open source
| product that is supposedly not beholden to the desires of advertisers -
| has done little to shift the balance in providing end-users with greater
| control over how their CPU gets consumed. Consider that at one time
| Netscape supported a feature where you could stop animated GIFs. They've
| long since dropped that capability, and perhaps because animated GIFs
| are becoming rare, but where is the modern day equivalent? The browser
| ought to have an option you can set where all plugin and JS threads are
| put to sleep on inactive windows (with he ability to override that for a
| tiny number of sites where background processing is actually useful).

Actually, FF still has the ability to control image  animation;  it's
just  not  to be found anywhere in the Preferences stuff.  But if you
use the about:config gimmick, and filter  for  "image",  you'll  find
image.animation_mode,  which you can set.  You also have to know that
its values are "never", "once"  and  "forever"  (and  possibly  other
undocumented  things).  So the real annoyance is that they removed it
from the  usual  Preferences  stuff,  and  they  don't  document  its
possible values.  I have no idea why they did this.

At least that's my understanding of it now.  I could be wrong, and it
could  be accessible in a more user-friendly fashion, if you can call
a confusing tree of little windows user friendly.  In particular,  it
would be nice if they would actually list all the accepted values for
string-valued variables.  And for image animation, it would be really
useful if you could set it to "once" or "never", but have an entry in
the image's menu that would change the  setting  for  just  that  one
image.   I  usually run with it set to "once", but if I want to rerun
the animation, the quickest way I know to do it  is  to  refresh  the
entire page with CTRL-R, which downloads everything in the page.

I wouldn't say that animated GIFs are especially rare. They're common
for  online  avatars in most forums, and I've also seen a fair number
of them in astronomy sites. Just a few days ago, I saw one with three
frames. It was a series of images showing the motion of a newly-found
object whose orbit is nearly identical to Pluto's, but which  is  180
degrees out of phase from Pluto. The object stood out among the stars
in the animated gif, since it jumped about every second.


--
   _,
   O   John Chambers
 <:#/> <jc-8FIgwK2HfyJMuWfdjsoA/w at public.gmane.org>
   +   <jc1742-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
  /#\  in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, Earth
  | |
  ' `