How to Disable Firefox Animations for a Snappier Browser

[The AchieVer]

How to Disable Firefox Animations for a Snappier Browser 

Despite making the experience with software applications a little bit more fluid, animations aren’t necessarily something that everyone loves.

And this is because there are moments when instead of ensuring a smooth transition between two frames, these animations actually generate a more or less noticeable slowdown in performance.

The living proof is none other than Windows itself. Some of the visual effects that are part of the operating system could slow it down on older configurations, and this is why many decide to disable them altogether.

Others just want to turn off animations because they’re not big fans of such visual tweaks, and they would rather prefer a faster experience rather than modern looks.

As the world’s number two browser on the desktop, Mozilla Firefox itself comes with a series of animations to make the experience overall feel more modern, and just like in the example we discussed above, there are users who just want to disable them.

The purpose in this case is obtaining a snappier browser, and while the improvements aren’t necessarily obvious at first, they do help make Firefox a bit faster.
 

 

 

Fortunately, disabling animations in Firefox is just a matter of editing a single flag in the about:configscreen, and it all takes just a matter of seconds to do it. Rebooting the browser isn’t even necessary because everything happens the moment you make the changes.

So the first step is to enter the about:config page. To do this, launch Firefox and type the following command:

about:config

At this point, Firefox should warn that you’re about to make changes that could affect browser stability, so click yes to advance to the next step.

Now you just need to look for the flag that enables all animations in Firefox. To do this, type the following command in the search box at the top:

toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled

As you’ll notice when finding it, the flag comes is set to true by default, which means that it’s enabled in Firefox. So you just have to double-click the flag to toggle it to false and disable it.

true = enabled
false = disabled

Once you make these changes, animations should no longer be enabled in Firefox.

While the lack of animations might not be so obvious at first, the easiest way to observe their absence is to look closely at the tab design when loading a page.

The default Firefox configuration includes an animation that shows the progress of loading the page. Once you disable animations using the steps mentioned above, this progress bar should no longer show up in the tab.

Another animation that goes away after setting the aforementioned flag to false concerns the reload button in the toolbar at the top. Without the flag active in Firefox, clicking the browser does nothing, whereas the animation provides a pretty neat visual feedback as the page is reloading.

As for the performance gain after disabling animations, this can’t necessarily be measured, but most users claim Firefox is indeed snappier. I think the improvement is mostly noticeable on older hardware where Firefox might otherwise struggle, so disabling visual effects that would otherwise require more processing power leaves resources for other tasks.

The latest version of the browser is Firefox 67.0.1, and the steps mentioned here work like a charm in this release too. In other words, you can use this trick to disable animations in any Firefox version since Mozilla rolled out the Quantum update, albeit dedicated options to control them from the settings screen would be more than helpful.

 

 

 

 

Source