1215124 - Preference for controlling css animation and transforms

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[crxssi]

More and more sites are adding unnecessary animation to their pages.  While this is a design choice it presents specific issues for certain users, especially thin client users.  Unnecessary animation:

1) Uses extra CPU.  On shared systems with thin clients, this can be a problem.

2) On thin clients it creates a tremendous amount of wasted network traffic that causes bandwidth restrictions.

3) On portable machines that run on batteries, it drains the battery unnecessarily due to extra CPU usage.

4) It can be incredibly annoying to the viewer, especially when trying to read other text on the screen.

5) Site rendering and display can be incredibly slow for older or slower machines.

In the old days, animation could be blocked by simply making sure there was no Flash installed and by setting user_pref("image.animation_mode", "once") and this would stop annoying animated GIF (and presumably APNG) by allow them to go through only a single cycle.  Now it is also necessary to disable html5 video (at least for thin clients).  But there still remains no preference to limit or stop css based animations.  Example of a page with such animation: http://www.clamav.net/404  A logo is animated spinning forever.  It would be far more reasonable to animate for only a single spin and stop, or for X number of seconds and stop.  In this example they have it set "forever".

Here is a site that talks about such animations:  http://www.w3schools.com/css/css3_animations.asp

Although it might be possible to restrict such things with a user style sheet ( see http://dev.webonomic.nl/how-to-disable-css-transforms-transistions-and-animations ) I believe it would be better if Firefox started adding some preferences to allow centralized and easier control over such things.  One such setting might allow the user to force a "duration" directive that overrides "forever".