Frankly, I don't read them. Pretty ironic since I'm a designer and usually am interested in advertising and things of this sort. I just don't think I've ever seen a good one or even clicked on one at all!

Visit My Website!: - David Bailey - graphic artist - ONLINE PORTFOLIO -

I deal with these the same way, Ivan. Haven't really thought about it, but I'll share this:

I'd like to start a vicious rumor that animated gifs will cause your Google ranking to drop.

hehe

Terry Thornhill

e-zign Design Group

Unfortunately this doesn't work on Safari, but in Firefox and Internet Explorer you can stop the animations by simply hitting ESCape once the page has loaded.

I use something called Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org). It's basically an annoyance filter.. Animated GIFs, flash, ads, etc.. One of its filter options is to reduce all animated GIFs to only their first frame.

This does nothing for those on Macs, but I use an IE based wrapper, called Maxthon that has a inline ad blocker, and just replaces them with [Blocked Ads].

Helps out quite a bit, as I never have to see them :)

Im sure there are some FF extensions that do the same thing...

Nate Cavanaugh
http://alterform.com
http://shift22.com

Using the Web Developer's Toolbar extension for Firefox you can disable gif animations on the Disable menu.

Disable > Disable Image Animations

In omniweb, you can set page specific options to animate for 0 seconds, 30 seconds, or forever.

I use OmniWeb because you can customize what you see globally or on a site-by-site basis. I believe Pithhelmet also takes care of this in Safari. Flash animations are more difficult to deal with since you have to "hunt them down" to block out their URLs. The Flashkit site is really annoying for this but I've got most of the ads there blocked.

When I didn't have either of these I generally found alternative sites.

Oh, and I try to avoid patronizing the advertisers and the sites their ads are found on. (Such advertisers (and spammers) only continue to do this because they get enough bites.)

If you use Safari (there are good, free adblockers for Firefox), you could use Pithhelmet. I find it really quite neat. You basically block all ads, which I guess is what we all want. Personally I don't see many animated gif ads these days, but I'm sooo annoyed by flash banners WITH SOUND. Theyre all over the news sites over here in Europe :)

http://culater.net/software/PithHelmet/PithHelmet.php ($10)

In safari 2 you can right click (control - click) on an image and select "stop Animation" I havn't tested it yet but I guess that will fix it.

(this could also be part of "saft" a plugin for Safari, so don't complain if it doesn't work, get saft :P )

Opera has had an option to block all animated GIFs from every site for ages.

See http://operalover.tntluoma.com/8/day_5_advanced_preferences_2

It can be turned on/off by simply pressing F12