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Animation performance on the web

Animation performance on the web - Ada Rose Edwards

  • Aiming for the feeling of a native app
    • shouldn't notice a difference
    • shouldn't feel like struggling
  • scaling and dragging should feel stuck to your finger
  • don't show what the user can't interact with

Performance, what is jank?

  • 60fps
  • 16ms to render a frame
  • 60fps with the occasional hiccup looks far worse than just running at 30fps
  • typically longer render times are typically caused by layout and paint
  • by changing a layout property, you can end up causing the browser to recalculate the rest of the page
  • paint is when
  • great resource: Paul Lewis's CSS Triggers
  • don't
    • change the height, then calculate what it is immediately
    • repeatedly add text in a loop, join it together then append it once
    • this is known as layout thrashing
  • calculate many times, apply onces
  • checkout fastdom, gives you an async API for DOM reads and writes
  • why is layout so difficult?
  • don't animate layout
    • animating the width of a text block is super expensive
  • if something bad is happening in a modal, the browser isn't smart enough to realise that it's separate from the rest of the page
    • there's an experimental API for contain: strict; to tell the browser that it is
    • possible to stop the reflow of a document by isolating something before it's recalculated (not necessarily recommended)
  • the internet has threads
    • it's possible to do some calculations off the main thread
    • example: sending something to the physics engine to process on a different thread
  • can trade pre-caching for performance
    • don't try to eat all your data at once, have it in little bits
  • data visualisation can be passed to WebGL to be processed on your graphics card
  • "you don't want to accidentally set fire to a piece of cardboard attached to someone's face"