Pausing a .gif animation in Google Chrome

Nope, not yet. There is a feature request to add it to Webkit (which is what Chrome is based off of).

you can "grab" the image with your cursor and "hold" a stop-frame of it but once you let go it will begin again

There's a great extension for this: Gif Scrubber!

Allows stepping, exploding to see all individual frames (so frame download), with simple shortcuts.

(not in any way affiliated, just stoked it works so well)