560084 - Make video-like controls available for animated images

Status: NEW

(Core :: Graphics: ImageLib, enhancement)

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

I don't think we'd ever include this as part of the browser, but I also don't think that imagelib currently exposes enough control to allow an extension to do something like this. I know it's been requested before for other uses...

Comment 4

[Dan Jacobson]

Nowadays one can even pause entire movies.

Comment 5

[Zack Weinberg (:zwol)]

Since we had to implement built-in controls for <video controls>, I think we should go ahead and make them available for <img> as well when the image is animated.  In the stock browser, not as an extension.  And whether or not the image is standalone.

Comment 8

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

(In reply to Zack Weinberg (:zwol) from comment #5)
> we should go ahead and make them available for <img> as well when the image is
> animated. 

+1 to this. It would be cool to have 
* a play-stop button
* to get a frame by frame buttons
* and a save this frame feature

Comment 9

[Calum]

I would like to add a use-case that I have encountered.

I have Adblock enabled but for some websites I disable it to allow unobtrusive ads to be shown and support the site.

However the websites have repeating animated gifs for advertising that I still find annoying so I tried disabled autoplaying all gifs using image.animation_mode;false. This disables all gifs from playing but this applies to all websites and there is no way to control individual gifs and I am currently testing out image.animation_mode;once to see if it's a suitable compromise.

What would be good though is that if image.animation_mode is set to none or once that the gifs have a play/pause button like videos are when stopped from autoplaying. It would therefore allow a form of soft-adblocking but websites still benefit from showing the static ads.

To summarise it would be useful to have animated images to have play/pause controls, which in conjunction with image.animation_mode creates a less distracting browsing experience.

I guess to only problem is that small gifs e.g. loading animations would be swept up in this...

Comment 10

[Adam Katz]

Animated GIFs are already movies, even though they play in <img> tags (see also bug 895131, which goes the other direction). I'd like <img src="animated.gif"> to behave pretty much identically to <video src="animated.webm" autoplay loop muted>, by which I mean the context menu should contain Pause, Play Speed, Loop, Show Controls, and Full Screen (View Video and Copy Video Location are already covered by View Image and Copy Image Location, though we could replace all "Image" references with "Video" if desired).

As animated image formats like Animated WebP, Apple Live Photo, and Google Motion Photo/Motion Stills get more popular, this line will continue to blur. I like the simplicity of considering movie-like images as images with animated-gif-like defaults (autoplay, loop, muted, no controls), but I really think we need the video context menu and the ability to stop or show controls.

Another thought is how we deal with animated gifs that are set via CSS background-image. We already have View Background Image, so we could presumably add most of the video context menu right there (not Show Controls though; where would they appear?).

Comment 11

[Dan Jacobson]

http://www.softpond.com.tw/egarden/0011.gif
here we are, just a gif, no HTML involved at all,
but we are still helpless to even pause it.

Comment 12

[wojtek]

This would be great to have. A lot of blogs are adding those with screencast and would be awesome being able to pause those.