Thanks all for your feedback. I have removed the images to improve readability, especially for mobile users. The post was originally written for an internal blog where we have a GIF-heavy communication culture, and I probably should have cleaned it up a bit more for general public consumption.

This article actually got me to go track down the firefox pref "image.animation_mode". "none" is a very nice choice.

I second this. I had to zoom way in so I could scroll between the animations for undisturbed reading.