Subpixel animation differences on browsers

http://codepen.io/MattyBalaam/full/eaJto

by bpierre • 13 years ago

12 17 13 years ago

aparadja• 13 years ago

Can someone explain what we're supposed to see here? Why is this interesting? I'm genuinely curious.

duiker101• 13 years ago

I THINK(but I am not sure because I didn't look too much) that what is going on is that those balls are moving at high speed by small amounts with css and what wants to be demonstrated is how different browser render floating points pixel values. I think. I might be wrong.

lotsofcows• 13 years ago

I think you're right but I'm more interested in all the cool cognitive/visual artefacts they're causing!

basch3• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering

nekgrim• 13 years ago

I can't find any difference in Chrome, but in FF there's a visible difference between the renderings.

MrBuddyCasino2• 13 years ago

Confirmed. Smooth & nice in Chrome, but not in FF.

Achshar• 13 years ago

LAtest IE and Chrome seem to be fine. FF (25) seems to be jittery on both. No Idea why that is though.

karka91• 13 years ago

I'm getting the opposite. Chrome is jittery on both and firefox smoothes out the sub pixel animation quite nicely. I'm using Ubuntu

bpierre• 13 years ago

Some information about rendering issue on Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=739176

jasonkester• 13 years ago

This is another example of how web development hasn't changed at all from its state in 1996. At least, the part where you need specific code paths for every web browser that you want to support.

It's sad, really. We've had HTML5 sold as the holy grail where you get to write your code to The Standard and it will work the same everywhere. Except The Standard is open enough to interpretation that no two browsers implement the same thing exactly the same way. And little bugs in one browser's implementation mean you can't rely on individual features, to the point where most features have to be either crossed off your wishlist or worked around.

It was the same when the DOM and CSS changes came in around the turn of the century, and all you need do was code to The Standard and everything would work everywhere. (But then Netscape 6 came out and couldn't even render netscape.com anymore.)

The saddest part is that this same demo could have been written in Flash (a 15 year old version of it if we wanted), and it would run not only on every major browser in existence, but also faster and smoother by pretty much any benchmark you care to name.

Don't get me wrong, I still have my bet squarely on HTML5, and I really really want the browser vendors to get their shiz together. But as a front-end developer I've personally been waiting seventeen years for it. And it seems as far away today as it ever has.

coldtea• 13 years ago

This is another example of how web development hasn't changed at all from its state in 1996. At least, the part where you need specific code paths for every web browser that you want to support.

Well, it very much changed in the way that these differences are much smaller that they used to be, and for far less basic stuff.

I've been in 1997 and in 1999 and in 2002. It's not like that time at all.

moron4hire• 13 years ago

Firefox apparently has a lot of issues with subpixels. I notice a very serious lag, about 1 or 2 whole seconds, between the end of a scroll and the text kn the page finally settling into its proper rendering.

Subpixel animation differences on browsers

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