I didn’t find any current addons or solutions for doing so when I looked it up.
You can probably do it with Greasemonkey, have you tried that yet?
When viewing a gif (say https://i.imgur.com/l53kRnm.gifv) you can right click it and select “Show Controls”.
that isn’t strictly speaking a gif. imgur (among other image/video/etc hosting) can do a lot of tricks. that “.gifv” at the end of the url makes it present the “gif” as a video (mp4, in this case).
If you change the url to end with just “.gif”, then it’ll show it as an actual gif
That worked, but how can I make it always show controls?
That’s not a GIF, that’s gifv, a format from Imgur to show videos as GIFs. It doesn’t work when I try it on an actual GIF: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=web+gif+example#vhid=YGtfdlLW95ObWM&vssid=l.