481927 - UI to control animated GIFs

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 560084

(Core :: Graphics: ImageLib, enhancement)

Description

[Andrew Simmons]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090306 Minefield/3.2a1pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090306 Minefield/3.2a1pre

I spend a lot of time on www.unmannedspaceflight.com, where animated GIFs are often posted to demonstrate changes in planetary features, alignments between different views of the same area, and so on. It is frequently frustrating that there no UI to perform actions such as:

- change the frame-change delay rate
- pause individual frames
- stop animation altogether
- possibly others.

As a general rule I guess the answer would be "view the image in a specialist image-manipulation application"; but this is a file format which is primarily handled by the browser itself, unlike (say) office documents, or by plug-ins (as with Flash, PDF, multimedia files and so on.)



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. View animated GIF.
2. Grind teeth at your inability to control the display of the image.
3. 
Actual Results:  
Frames of the animated GIF change at the speed in ms defined when the original file was created, regardless of the speed of the client, which causes unpredictable results depending on the speed of one's hardware. If you want to examine a single frame in more detail, you must use an external application. If you want to freeze or pause the animation, you can use another app or close the tab.

Expected Results:  
two or three simple buttons are displayed. A slider control, or up/down arrows, cointrol the speed of the loop. There are play, pause and stop buttons. 

Note: these controls should only be displayed when the browser is viewing a naked GIF file; this shouldn't happen when they are used in-line in a page. (Perhaps they could be optionally displayed in the context menu, for animated GIFs only.)

Yes, a rather obscure, unusual use case; 
yes, possibly better suited for a plugin;... 

but it would be a great grace note for some of us.

Comment 1

[Bobby Holley (:bholley)]

You can hit escape to stop the animation entirely. Anything more complicated is definitely the domain of extensions.

This isn't to say that I don't think it's a neat idea (could be used for APNGs too). I'd be more than happy to offer you support and guidance if you decide to write an extension for this, and could even be persuaded to add necessary API bits if I feel like they're useful in general. Ping me on irc (bholley on #gfx) if you want to pursue it.

Resolving as WONTFIX for core.