Starting with Firefox 20, the ‘Esc’ key will no longer stop a page from loading or stop animated GIFs from animating. This change goes back to November of 2010 with Bug 614304 (ESC key aborts XMLHttpRequest and WebSocket). Without getting into too much technical details, pressing the Esc key can cause major problems for sites that use Web Apps that are coded in Ajax or use jQuerry. With the growing popularity and number of web apps came a great number of users accidentally hitting the escape key. So effective with Firefox 20 the Esc key will no longer stop anything, it simply won’t do anything.
There was a proposal (bug 824248) to remap the old Esc key behavior to SHIFT+Esc. However, it seems that Mozilla does not want to make this change as a result the bug has been marked as RESOVLED WONTFIX. There is an add-on that will allow users to press SHIFT+Esc to stop animated gifs (and anything else on the page). The add-on is SuperStop and only works with Firefox 20 (moving into the Aurora branch next week) or newer.
This is very disappointing. I just discovered this behavior and was trying to figure out what was wrong. I use all the time in Firefox, especially with Finds and page navigation via keyboard. Not having makes my browsing experience extremely awkward now.
Thank you for posting the fix. Animated gifs drive me crazy and I was searching for another browser until I found your post.
Ugh, Firefox releases are getting to be annoyances because of the things they break. I’m downgrading back to 19 until there’s a plugin that brings back the escape behavior without the shift modifier.
In Internet Explorer the escape key stops animated gifs so any application developer trying to use the escape key is going to fail with a huge percentage of users anyway so why make Firefox different?
My guess is because with by design Gecko (Firefox’s rendering engine) the Escape key stops EVERYTHING (not just animated gifs) where as Trident (Internet Explorer) just stops animations. Not sure about webkit (Chrome and Safari), I almost thinking the Escape key does nothing there.
So what if the escape key causes some obscure Ajax and JQuerry crap that shouldn’t be monitoring the escape key in the first place! Escape is a standard defacto key for stopping animated GIFs ever since web browsers began in the 1990s! Screw newer add-on crap that isn’t coded right in the first place! Stupid Mozilla is screwing up Firefox so bad with its inept version numbering, design choices like disabling escape and removing most :visited link CSS customization! I’d be off to another web browser if there was one as good and as customizable as Firefox is. Firefox is only surviving THIS long because extension developers are bothering to put up with it-but for how long?? Mozilla better be careful…