> I turn off image loading at home.  I do it partly to improve speed, but
> mostly to avoid *animated* GIFs.  The greatest drawback is that this
> renders some sites unusable.
>
> When there's a moth flitting around the edge of my newspaper, I brush it
> away.  With animations, I have to select "stop," which may stop the loading
> of something I *do* want to see.

[...]

> I might turn images on and off more frequently, but for two misfeatures
> of NS 4.0x.  First, it's no longer a first-level menu option; I have to
> wander down to the "Preferences..." choice, expand one of the left-hand
> navigation items, and click on the appropriate box, and that's too much
> work. [...]

Preamble: This is *not an advertisement*, for 1. I'm not involved in any way
other than being a happy user; 2. Nobody is going to earn money (immediately).

Having this said, you may want to try WebWasher:
    http://www.siemens.de/servers/wwash/wwash_us.htm

Both, comfort and speed, is improved: You have a wide range of options to
choose, *which* images you don't want to be shown (probably advertisement
banners and stuff). You are enabled to disable JS to a certain, customizable
extend, in order to avoid popup-windows, redirection, etc. Again, too heavy use
of these "washing" options will render some sites unusable, but
activate/deactivate is exactly *one* click away.

They promised an option to stop animations soon. And they do develop the tool,
updates are frequently released.

That's all for now,
    V.

--
 Volker C. Schoech
    Hamburg-Trier, Germany  -  [log in to unmask]
    a/s DATI, Riga, Latvia  -  [log in to unmask]
 http://schoech.cjb.net/   (JavaScript required!)
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