Yes, you can actually pause GIFs. You right click on it, then click something along the lines of “controls” and then you get a pause and play button!

Can we pause a GIF?

Animated GIFs are technically images instead of videos, so click-to-play plugins and video-blocking extensions like FlashBlock won’t stop them from automatically playing. This used to be easier: You could just press the “Esc” key to pause animated GIFs on the current page.

Can you freeze frame a GIF?

Only the first frame of the animation can be written to canvas , which results in a frozen version of the gif. Now you can control the animation a frame at a time using mouse events or manual triggers.