Google-chrome – How to stop animated gifs in Google Chrome

Animated GIFS have been a back and forth issue with Chrome (quick dev ticket and Chrome group search shows issues). Currently, Version 6.0.401.1 of the Dev handles most GIFs as ChrisF stated - no repeat unless repeat is specified in the GIF. This is technically the correct way to handle animated GIFs but is typically not the expected way.

You can see many of the bugfixes and updates at the Chrome releases blog and you may want to give a Beta or Dev version of Chrome a try just for comparison. There is a newer version of Chrome stable than the one you have stated so you may even want to try that (but I didn't notice anything about GIF image handling in the release notes).

Animated GIFs really are the love 'em/hate 'em files of the internet. The fact that you have only 3 frames makes me think it is rocketing through those 3 frames and ending - it may not be reading the hold or pause settings you have indicated in the file.

2016-04 Update

There's a new extension that was published since my original answer, called "Disable HTML5 Autoplay". It seems to work well. The author is responsive and development is active. As per the name, it is for HTML5 video elements, not Flash objects. You can get it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-autoplay/efdhoaajjjgckpbkoglidkeendpkolai

As for videos powered by Adobe's Flash plugin, it appears that Chrome by default now attempts to detect whether a Flash object is "important" to the page and disables it if not, so you may find that sufficient. You can also set it to prohibit ANY Flash object from running automatically. Personally, I suggest doing this (or even removing the plugin if you do not depend upon it), as it has been a frequent source of major security vulnerabilities for years. You can do this in Chrome at: Menu > settings > advanced settings (link at the bottom) > Privacy header, Content settings button > Plugins header, "Let me choose when to run plugin content" option. You can also manage exceptions here, which would be pages on which plugins are automatically run.

In addition, I should point out that the auto-refresh blocking workaround in the original answer below was adapted from an answer to this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18273767/how-can-i-block-page-autorefresh-in-google-chrome - I'm not aware of any new solutions at this time.

Original Answer

Unfortunately, I have researched for ways to do these things in Chrome, and found nothing that will work well, but I have a partial workaround here.

The best you can do to prevent refreshes is to use a bookmarklet or a user script extension like Tampermonkey to add the following Javascript to the domain in question:

window.onbeforeunload = function(){ return 'Disabled Auto-Refresh';};

If you want it as a bookmarklet, simply add "javascript:" to the front and make that the target of a bookmark. Click it when you're on the page you want to prevent from refreshing.

This will cause you to get the "Do you want to navigate away from this page?" popup when the site tries to refresh, which is annoying (thanks, Google), but at least you can tell it "no". It simply isn't possible to do this correctly in Chrome due to its limited extension API.

Similarly, there appears to be no good way to prevent HTML5 videos from playing automatically aside from blocking them outright. The closest I have seen anything come is this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stop-youtube-html5-autopl/ajkibmginjljbmmpgnipfbcbmkcodaap that tries to pause videos, but the author admits that it doesn't have universal compatibility, and the reviews mention that it doesn't have a whitelist. I don't know whether it is once again Chrome's API limitations that are preventing us from doing what we want or just that nobody has made an appropriate extension.