Here’s A Fix For Chrome’s Slow Loading Of Animated GIFs

Google is currently on the case, pushing updates to the stable version of Chrome, but in the meantime, if you’re finding that GIFs bring your browser to its knees, there’s a simple tweak you can apply to make it run significantly better.

Reddit user SocksForBreakfast had a play around with Chrome’s various flags and came across one called “Enable GPU rasterization”. The description states that it allows the GPU to handle the rendering of web content, which would included images.

Turning this flag on and restarting Chrome should make GIFs (and other multimedia) load faster, at the expense of some GPU resources. That said, Google is aware of the issue and performance improvements have been forthcoming, but it still hasn’t completely solved the problem.

Until then, give your CPU a break and let your graphics card share some of the internet browsing load.

PSA: If you’ve been having issues with Chrome slowing down to a crawl while gifs are loading, here is the fix! [Reddit, via gHacks]