14 DAY TRIAL // Sometimes, browser bugs are just like discussions between a married couple. You argue over it, you close the subject, and then it pops up over and over again every few months, like it never happened before.
The Firefox support team seems to be going through the exact same process with a bug related to animated favicon GIFs.
First opened in November 2001, bug #111373 was started by a user who goes by the name of Chris Gushue, who felt that Firefox should provide an option that will disable animations in the browser's favicon.
Across time, over 12 other users reported the same issue in different bugs, and the comments on the original thread provide an insight over how we evolved in using the Web itself.
While in the beginning most concerns were about distracting the user's attention from the page's content, today, users tend to be mad because of performance issues on their laptops, where animated favicons are a serious drain on their devices' batteries.
Animated favicons will drain your laptop's battery
Solutions have been proposed like a dedicated about:config option, creating a special option in the browser's settings UI, disabling support for animated GIFs altogether, and even removing favicon support, which was truly exaggerated and proposed back in 2001, when favicons were still a new thing.
While the bug was opened, closed, and re-opened several times, the last comment related to a laptop's battery life will surely prompt the Mozilla team in action, most browser support teams nowadays paying a lot of attention to any issue that might affect a device's battery life.
Of course, if you want to dig around in Mozilla's bug tracker, you'll find that many similar bugs opened since the company's early beginnings, one of them being bug #78414 about some keyboard shortcuts not working while a Flash or QuickTime plugin is focused, or bug #307089 related to viewing a page's source code, both 14- and 10-year-old topics.