I can’t bear having something moving on a web page. It just distracts my attention while I’m reading. Here’s how to disable most of animations in Firefox:

1. Open about:config page, set image.animation_mode to none. This will disable gif animation.
2. Disable blinking. On about:config page, set browser.blink_allowed to false. Now <blink> tag doesn’t blink anymore.
3. Disable Flash but not completely. Flash animations seldom carry useful information but most often are used for ads. I installed Adblock and added .swf to filter list. If some site doesn’t work without Flash I add it to white list.
4. Some sites use JavaScript to display animation. For example: xe.com. In these cases NoScript extension might help but more and more sites now rely heavily on Ajax and hence on JavaScript so it’s too much trouble to white-list sites as you surf the Web.