711827 - Pressing [Escape] should stop all kind of animations

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[antistress]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:11.0a1) Gecko/20111215 Firefox/11.0a1
Build ID: 20111215031153

Steps to reproduce:

Since the Stop and Reload buttons are combined into one, pressing [Escape] is the current way to stop animations.
And it is indeed currently used to stop animated GIF (here is an exemple http://cybernetnews.com/pause-animated-gifs-in-firefox-and-ie/) and animated PNG (here is an exemple http://bradfordsherrill.com/web-design/animated-png/).

According to that comment https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70030#c68, the user should be able to stop 'activity' on a page AFTER it has been loaded from the network.  This 'activity' includes:
  1. Animated GIFs or PNGs (Esc key already stop them with Firefox 11.0a1 on Linux)
  2. Javascript (timeouts)
  3. Plugins (see Bug 267141 for Flash animations)
I would add :
  4. animated CSS (here is an exemple http://css-tricks.com/examples/CSS3Clock/)
  5. audio/video HTML5 elements
  6. WebGL ?
  7. Good old HTML BLINK element  (see Bug 399622 ; here is an exemple http://www.aliasdmc.fr/balise/zone_html_blink.html)
and also :
  6. animated favicon (see Bug 392866)

Please allow user to stop animations by pressing the Escape key.

A few side notes :
- There are some related bugs concerning the Stop button before it was combined with the Reload one which could be reopened with the Escape key in mind (see for instance Bug 21623).
- Concerning the  number 5 (audio/video HTML5 elements), Bug 667357 is about another way to prevent annoyance ("Add an item in preferences window to allow user to decide to prevent autoplay for video/audio content")
- SeaMonkey as a similar bug report : Bug 11875

Comment 1

[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 giving users the ability to pause, stop, or hide animations that run for more than 5 seconds.

Note that unlike when this bug was opened, 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's 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, nor the other types of animations mentioned in the original description.

My preferred solution is the traditional ability to have animations play by default, and then be able to instantly stop all of them on the page/tab with a keystroke, since image 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, nor of course non-image-based animation.

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, nor non-image-based animation.

If I'm not mistaken, 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 etc., to allow WebExtensions to have this important ability.

Updating Firefox so that it has the ability to stop all types of animation, and thus be able to implement W3C accessibility guidelines even where webmasters fail to do so, seems like a far-away dream right now, given how things stand.  However, an important first step would be to at least get stopping of image animations working again (including favicons), and in a way that will continue working post-Firefox-57.