>>1
You've discovered the gift of not playing GIFs. Animated GIFs and Flash are two of the worst ideas. There's nothing I hate more than animated gay FrontPage 12 year old family web sight bullshit as I try to read the piece of crap the stupid web designer wrote in a tiny ugly font in a gay colour.
Still, if you fancy the second part of sadomasochism, you can control how GIF files are animated. In your urlbar, type about:config, press enter, then use the filter to search for image.
The setting you want is
image.animation_mode , which can be set to "none" (good), "once" (good too because you get to see it once but then it STFUs), and "normal" if you are an Internet Explorer user.