[Novices] website taking up too many CPU cycles

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> 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. 

Yes, animations must, for obvious reasons, be processed by the local
display unit.

> 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.

If they are merely animated images pressing "Esc" should stop them,
adds and such are usually animated images, or at least auto refreshing
images. Flash animations seem not to obey the 'stop' commaned issued by
pressing escape, but you can right click on them and unclick "Play".

Mozilla might have a 'do not play animated images' option somewhere,  I
think Galeon once did, but Firefox seems not to.