Disable Download Animation in Firefox

As you may know, Firefox 57 comes with a new user interface, known as "Photon". It is intended to provide a more modern, sleek feel that’s consistent across multiple platforms. It replaced the previous "Australis" UI and features new menus, a new customization pane and tabs without rounded corners. There are a number of fancy animations enabled by default in the Proton UI. One of them is the download animation. If you have disabled animations earlier, you might want to get rid of the download animation too.

Firefox 57 is a huge step forward for Mozilla. The browser comes with a new user interface, codenamed "Photon", and features a new engine "Quantum". It was a difficult move for developers, because with this release, the browser drops support for XUL-based add-ons completely! All of the classic add-ons are deprecated and incompatible, and only a few have moved to the new WebExtensions API. Some of the legacy add-ons have modern replacements or alternatives. Unfortunately, there are plenty of useful add-ons which have no modern analogs.

The Quantum engine is all about parallel page rendering and processing. It is built with a multi-process architecture for both CSS and HTML processing, which makes it more reliable and faster.

Here is how the download notification look in Firefox 57:

If you don't like new download animation of the Proton UI or you want to speed up the user interface of the browser, you can disable it quickly.

To disable the download animation in Firefox, do the following.

1. Open a new tab and enter the following text in the address bar:

   about:config

   Confirm that you will be careful if a warning message appears for you.

2. Enter the following text in the search box:

   browser.download.animateNotifications

   See the following screenshot:

3. You will see the parameter browser.download.animateNotifications. Double-click on it to set it to false.

If one day you change your mind, open the about:config page again, find the browser.download.animateNotifications parameter and set it to true. This will restore the download animation.

That's it.