hello Kangalarue, the steps you might want to take depend on what technologies the sites are using to show animations. here are two tips for the most commonly used animations:

• Adobe Flash animations: you can go to the firefox menu > addons > plugins and set the shockwave flash plugin to "always ask" - then no flash content will be played automatically. you can then control that behaviour through the small plugin icon that shows up on the left of the address bar, once plugin content is blocked on a page.

• Animated GIFs: some animations might be mere image files that contain an animation and loop endlessly. you can control their behaviour for all pages like this: enter about:config into the address bar (and confirm the warning dialog), search for the preference called "image.animation_mode". you can doubleclick that entry and change its value to either "none" or "once" (in this case they won't loop endlessly). http://kb.mozillazine.org/Animated_images

in case this doesn't help, you'd need to provide link to the pages in question so that we can give more targeted advice. thank you

Thank you! That is brilliant. I've just been on my bank's website and the horrid animation moves once then is still. (I have 'none' in the settings but one movement I can live with. Firefox's dog doesn't move at all.) My eyes just can't cope with repeated movement in peripheral vision so you have saved me many nasty headaches—either the literal kind or the results of having covered up the animations and so missed something important. Yours, Totally Grateful of Tavistock.

you're very welcome :))