392866 - Stopping animations by pressing [Escape] doesn’t work with Favicons

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Martin F.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a8pre) Gecko/2007081905 Minefield/3.0a8pre

Pressing [Escape] stops animated images, except Favicons.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a web page which uses an animated favicon in Firefox
2. Try to stop the animation by pressing Escape
Actual Results:  
The Favicon is still animated.

Expected Results:  
Animation should be stopped

This bug is not about:
- Ignoring animation in Favicons completely
- Implementing a preference to disable animated Favicons

Because animated Favicons are not (yet) used very often, I find it sufficient to stop the animation on pressing Escape, as I do with regular in-page GIFs.

I can think of reasonable uses for animated Favicons, such as having a calendar or monitoring page in a non-active tab, which can change its Favicon to an animated one to notify on specific events.

Comment 1

[Martin F.]

Attachment: Testcase

Comment 2

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

You can stop it by dragging the window or by right clicking the taskbar button.

Comment 3

[Dan Harkless]

Confirmed for Mac OS X and Linux.  Original report, or someone else with the rights, please change the Platform to All.

Ria, thanks for the workarounds, but they're not very convenient while trying to read a page that requires scrolling, and they don't work on OSes other than Windows.

Comment 4

[Dan Harkless]

Sorry, "original report" should have read "original reporter".

Also, in case it's helpful, one site which uses this "in the wild", at least as of this writing, is http://www.moneybluebook.com/ .

Comment 5

[Dan Harkless]

Apologies for another bugspam, but I just noticed that the Component is also incorrect, as this doesn't have to do with blocking images.  I'm not expert enough on the browser internals to know what the right component is, but perhaps ImageLib?  Or maybe ImageLib is properly wired up to stop favicon animations, but some UI component is not passing the Esc-press event to them?

Comment 6

[klonos]

This bug's status is unconfirmed. Dan in comment #3 confirmed this for Mac & Linux and I am confirming this now for Windows. Please someone change it to confirmed.

Comment 7

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> You can stop it by dragging the window or by right clicking the taskbar button.

Well, not even that anymore; it has been fixed in the meantime. So it continues animating no matter what you do. Even on the toolbar, on the tab, in the locationbar. 
(Not sure anymore what I was thinking while placing this comment.)

Comment 9

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv

Comment 11

[Dan Harkless]

This bug should be tagged as an Accessibility issue.  Many users have unusual brain wiring that results in them having hypervigilance (little to no ability to employ selective attention).  Unlike most people, when it comes to distracting extraneous animation in the field of view, these folks can't "just ignore it" / "just tune it out", making this a serious problem.  For comparison, note that most OSes have options to disable their use of unnecessary animations, and on Windows and iOS in particular, these are located under the Accessibility settings.  Similarly, W3C and Android accessibility guidelines require the ability to pause, stop, or hide looping animated elements.

And the title and description of this bug should be updated, since Esc no longer stops *any* animations unless an add-on like SuperStop (which uses Shift + Esc) or BetterStop (which can use Esc and/or Shift + Esc) is installed.  The bug requesting that that functionality (which reportedly had been present since Netscape version 1) be restored, bug 825486, has not only been closed as WONTFIX, but has been set so that normal Bugzilla users are prohibited from adding any comments, e.g. to provide reasoning why the developers should consider reopening it.  That strikes me as incredibly user-hostile; I've never seen a bug-tracker issue set that way before.  And of course opening a new bug would just be RESOLVED DUPLICATE of the WONTFIX.  This might even be seen as a contravention of the Americans with Disabilities Act, since Mozilla is U.S.-based.

The rationale for the WONTFIX was that web apps might want to use the Esc key; that's fine, but I think that's a far far more niche case than people who need to be able to stop animations.  And if you make the keystroke Shift + Esc, I think that tiny niche essentially disappears.  If it were really a concern, an about:config setting could certainly be provided to allow changing and/or disabling the keystroke (and an addable toolbar button could be provided so animations could be stopped even with the keystroke disabled, like the old Stop button used to be able to do).  The other justification for the WONTFIX was "Just use SuperStop or BetterStop; problem solved."  That's great, and I have been using SuperStop for years, but it and BetterStop are XUL/XPCOM add-ons which will cease working next month with Firefox 57.  And even for people moving to ESR or a Firefox fork to continue being able to use "legacy" extensions, these add-ons do not have the ability to stop animated favicons.

My preferred solution is the traditional ability to have image animations play by default, and then be able to instantly stop all of them on the page/tab with a keystroke, since animations are sometimes informational (e.g. looping video clips that constitute actual content on the page).  However, lacking that ability, one could go to about:config and set image.animation_mode = once.  This can still result in an intolerable amount of distracting animation, though (e.g. while scrolling through forum threads that use animated emoticons), since image animations will not stop until they get through all their frames while visible in the window (which sometimes takes quite a long time, if frame count and/or interframe delay are high).  And even if one were able to tolerate that, setting image.animation_mode = once does not affect animated favicons, which keep looping forever.

With the above two solutions unable to stop animated favicons, a third possibility would be the ability to quickly toggle image animation on or off globally, on demand.  I use the QuickJava add-on to achieve this.  Unfortunately it, too, is a XUL/XPCOM add-on with no announced plans to make a WebExtension version.  Presumably much of its functionality (including animated image disabling) wouldn't be possible as a WebExtension anyway.  And, once again, this is not a solution even for people migrating to a browser version that continues to support traditional add-ons, since turning off QuickJava's "A" button does not stop animated favicons.

I believe that even if the authors of these add-ons (which have not been updated in years) planned to rewrite them as WebExtensions, they would be unable to do so, without having a CSS property that allows disabling animations.  A proposal has been made as https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1615 to add such a property, but has received very little attention.  I think until such time as that becomes a standard CSS property, a Firefox-specific one should be added, à la -moz-user-select, to allow WebExtensions to have this important ability.

Although I'd prefer animated favicons be treated like other animated images, and made stoppable with a keystroke, I would also be fine with a global setting to disable all favicon animation, as requested in bug 111373.  Either way, this accessibility problem needs to be addressed, hopefully in a way that will continue to work post-Firefox-57.

Comment 12

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 15 votes.
:mossop, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 13

[BugBot (nomail) [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The last needinfo from me was triggered in error by recent activity on the bug. I'm clearing the needinfo since this is a very old bug and I don't know if it's still relevant.