Do not put a continuous animation on the whatsnew page, or stop animations when the user is idle

[joeytwiddle]

I woke up to find my laptop fan was spinning. Presumably it had been spinning all night!

Why? Because after logging in last night, Firefox had upgraded itself, and loaded this page:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/102.0a2/whatsnew/

That page has an animated SVG (class "mandala") and this had been animating all night!

Two things could have saved energy in this situation:

1. When Firefox updates, the "whatsnew" page it opens should not show an animation.

2. When the browser is not focused, and/or when the user goes idle, animations should stop animating.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[joeytwiddle]

For anyone who can't wait for this to be resolved, here is a userscript to fix it (you will need Tampermonkey or perhaps Greasemonkey installed):

```js
// ==UserScript==
// @name Remove Mandala from Firefox WhatsNew page
// @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version 1.0
// @description Removes Mandala from Firefox WhatsNew page
// @author You
// @match https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/*/whatsnew/*
// @grant GM_addStyle
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
'use strict';

// Hide it
//GM_addStyle(`.mandala-wrapper { display: none }`);

// Remove it completely
const elem = document.querySelector('.mandala-wrapper');
if (elem) {
elem.parentNode.removeChild(elem);
}
})();
```

[joeytwiddle]

I raised a PR for it here: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/12063

(Although I probably should have filed an issue.)

[maureenlholland]

Websites team is aware of the issue (thanks @joeytwiddle !) and is following up in the Bedrock repo

[Jon]

Hey all,

Here with an exciting update...

This has been shared with our dev team, and they are going to do the following:

1. Use the page visibility API so the animation will only play when the tab is active.
2. Pause the animation after it has been playing for X seconds (still determining X).

The combination of the above two items should help save battery / energy. 

Please feel free to keep the conversation going and stay tuned for more information 😀

-The Community Team

[KERR]

Related: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/add-option-to-make-animated-gif-images-click-to-play/idi-p/126

Eg, prevent GIFs from looping endlessly, which will save on CPU/battery.

[Jon]

Hey all,

High fives all around! This has been fixed and delivered—for more info, check out this link.

Keep on sharing your ideas/feedback as we work together to improve the Firefox experience 🙌