Mistwalker
Member
Same issue, and for about the same amount of time (somewhere around Firefox 41 or 42 that I noticed it).I updated my Firefox about a month or so ago for some reason, and now it has a heart attack any time a gif loads at all on a page. Pretty much impossible to scroll through any thread that has 2+ gifs or images. Thinking whatever they did in version 40+ broke some things.
Disabling Hardware Acceleration seemed to make the problem marginally better, but still didn't solve it. Using the 64-bit version of Firefox did nothing to solve it. It became such an irritation browsing with Firefox choking on each and every animated .gif on any given page that I've slunk back to Chrome, which I never thought I'd have to do.
Yeah, this seems to be the case. Even smaller .gifs can completely freeze Firefox for extended periods if the server delivering them is slow. After 4+ full versions of Firefox with this functionality, I realized they either see this working as intended, or are in no hurry to fix it.Yup, it sucks on NeoGAF. Big time. So many "beachballs" in recent months.
Firefox seems to want to load the entire GIF before rendering that part of a page, rather than show it as it loads like it used to. That can mean waiting 10+ seconds while the browser hangs when someone decides it would be fun to drop a 30 MB reaction GIF into a thread.
It's made much worse when the GIFs come over an https connection.