How to get rid of Annoying GIF Images in Google Plus?Google Plus supports posting Animated GIFs as the status. That is cool, but the unwanted animations take extra time and resources to load and simply ruin the interaction by their clumsy looks. I’m not saying that animations and animated GIFs have no purpose, but you know, they have their own place of application. It feels really clumsy when you see one animation after the other – destroying your mood. It’s okay with one or two such animations, but if you have a very large network, you can see the whole Google Plus stream flooded with animations several times in a day.

You can get rid of these annoying Animated GIFs by implementing the below given tricks:

  • Simplest Trick – The ESC key: After all your page has loaded, just press the Escape (ESC) key on your keyboard, which will temporarily stop all the animations playing in the stream. To reactive the GIFs, reload the page by pressing F5. This trick works fine with Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari, but not in Google Chrome.
  • Google Chrome Extensions: If you are using Google Chrome, you can install GIF Stopper extension to stop GIF animations in your browser. It provides Google Chrome the same Functionality like we did in the above step i.e. the Escape key trick.
  • Mozilla Firefox Tweak:

    • There are no add-on packages available for Firefox to stop GIF animations, but it can be tweaked to stop playing animated GIF images. Just follow the steps below:

    1. Open a new tab in Firefox and type about:config in the address bar.
    2. Look for image.animation_modeType under Preference Name or just type “animation” in the Filter field, this will quickly show image.animation_mode entity.
    3. Double-click it to modify the String value. Change the string from “normal” to “none”. Click OK and close the tab.

    Now, reload your Google Plus stream, you’ll notice that the animated GIFs are not animating at all. You can restore the defaults by changing string value in Step 3 back to “normal”.