Order of the Bath

This week—Flashblock (and about:config)
I get irritated by blinking, moving, jumping pictures on web pages so one of the first things I do when installing Firefox is to control the animated images. This control is not on the options menu, you have to edit the configuration direct, but the package makes this easy. Type the dummy URL “about:config” into the address bar for a new tab and you will get a big list of all the variables that can be changed. You can see the ones in bold that you have changed either explicitly using this edit system or implicitly via the options menu and other decisions.
The one we are looking for here is “image.animation_mode”. Double click that line (or right click, Modify) and change the value to “once.” Then animated gifs will stop once they have gone through the first cycle rather than run continuously.
The flaw with this config screen is that there is no checking of the values and nolittle documentation but if you type rubbish in then it will be ignored without comment and use the default.

Now for flashblock. What this does is to replace all Macrovison Flash/Shockwave/Authorware objects by a button. Clicking the button activates the object but otherwise it just sits there without distracting you. As the majority are advertising or useless intro screens, I very rarely click them.

This entry was posted on 19 Sep 2006 at 09:10 by Rick and is filed under Browsers, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.