[Novices] website taking up too many CPU cycles

[Steve Petersen]

Hey folks,

Thanks in advance for any help you might have on this question:

More and more webpages these days have fancy animations on them, and 
apparently farm out the computational power required for these to my 
local machine.  That's pretty annoying, especially when they're ads. 
They take up an astonishing amount of processing power, as monitored in 
my little Gnome panel.  (I'm currently running RH 8 on an AMD 
800-something with at least like 256 RAM--honestly I forget, it's old!) 
  The machine slows down significantly; even character echos of typing 
slows.

I don't want to buy a new machine, since this is the only time I lament 
having less processing power!  Can I set my Mozilla browser (currently 
1.6 but happy to upgrade) to give me a choice whether to run these or 
not?  I know nothing of web design:  are they flash, javascripts, 
animated gif's, some of each, what?  Currently my solution is just to 
close the web page--but this is only after being slowed and annoyed.

Thanks,
Steve