HN Explorer

35 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] thread
nico_h
Works smoothly in Safari on a macbook air.
zengenuity
Also on an iPhone 3G. Text is small, but the animation smooth and not slower than on my Macbook.
Batsu
I'm not sure I would call it smooth in Chrome on Windows 7, and this is on a gaming PC (more or less). The process was also using 25% CPU, which I believe Process Explorer would report as one full core.
papertiger
Not so smooth on Chrome/Ubuntu (on Mac hardware) either.

Cool experiment.

iaskwhy
Not smooth at all when you scroll.

It plays nicely on iPhone 2G but scrolling and zooming make it hang for a while, I even made the animation stop somehow.

I'm not sure this is the way to go...

yankeeracer73
The processor fan started up on my Macbook Pro 17" just like it does when I use Flash for more than 5 seconds. How ironical. :)
jim-greer
This has improved in 10.1, finally.
jws
Odd. Desktop iMac, older Core 2 version, it only takes me from my background 2% cpu use to 7% cpu use. Perhaps it is making heavy use of the GPU, which I wouldn't see in the cpu usage stats. (I add: using Safari.)
sirn
Oddly, it use 100% of one of my i7 iMac core when running on Chrome (6.0.408.1). However, the animation play very smooth with only 1~2% CPU usage when running on Safari (4.0.5 6531.22.7).

So I assume you're using Chrome?

Edit: -webkit-animation in general seems to be very slow in Chrome.

Edit again: Oh right, -webkit-animation is hardware-accelerated in Safari. http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/#comment-25071

swannodette
Huh. I have a new 13" Macbook Pro and my CPU is at 5%-8% in Safari.

However Google Chrome does not look like it hardware accelerates CSS animations so it's eating up 90% CPU on this.

hackermom
Odd. My 2.26ghz 13" MB Pro puts Safari at under 10% CPU usage for this; the CPU doesn't even clock over 1ghz running it.
X-Istence
Works well on my MacBook Pro 2.4 Ghz, Safari went from 0.0 %CPU used to 10.0 used, not bad. Flash tends use much more than that.
cpr
It looks like only Apple has hooked up WebKit animation to an underlying Core Animation-equivalent layer in the OS which uses the GPU for most of the hard work.

Not sure if Google is really motivated to do this kind of system-specific work in Chrome beyond the basic port.

swannodette
I would argue that they should be. CSS is well understood by designers/programmers and doing animations all in JS is error prone and off course a CPU hog. Hardware acceleration is particularly important when you're talking about devices with underpowered CPUs (Android). On my iPad/iPhone CSS animations outperform JS animations by a ridiculous margin.
cpr
Just to clarify, they do have the CSS-based animations, since they're WebKit-based, but they're just not hooked up to an underlying hardware-based implementation.
BoppreH
Chrome eats CPU like there's no tomorrow and the frame rate is around 15. Firefox doesn't even animate it.

Seriously, what is the point of this demos? It's like that Star Wars movie in ASCII. Interesting, but not very useful.

hackermom
Perhaps a good spurring for everyone else than Apple to pick up pace and get with implementing specifications for their browsers.
BoppreH
I wasn't referring to the implementations, but this new wave of CSS3/HTML5 demos doing nothing that could solve a real-world problem.

Sure, I'd like all browsers to have a correct implementation of this technologies, I'm just questioning this type of demo. In the end they are just a fancy ACID-like test and frankly, we already have more than enough for this use.

icefox
As cool as this is Neptune and Pluto orbits are wrong. They cross each others paths.
ugh
They should have just left out Pluto altogether. It’s not a planet. They could have put in the Kupier belt like they put in the asteroid belt.
joblessjunkie 

    -webkit-border-radius: 20px;
    -moz-border-radius: 20px;
    border-radius: 20px;
Really? Is this what we have to look forward to in CSS for the coming decade?
daleharvey
no, they will just be dropped when there is a standard syntax
joblessjunkie
But old browsers are forever.... witness IE6
daleharvey
by the time the lagards implement it, it will be standardised, ie doesnt require a prefix now that its finally implementing it.
devinj
Only old IE is forever. Chrome autoupdates very fast, Firefox a bit less so. I don't remember about Safari but I think they upgrade fast too.
alabut
This is a great demonstration of why to use CSS3 animations - Flash doesn't support the concept of graceful degradation. This page turns into a static image in Firefox/Mac instead of borking out with a blue lego piece.
Mgreen
I really appreciate the effort that has gone into building the demo. But i disagree with you.It is extremely easy for developers to provide fallback content when Flash is not availble.

As a developer, here is why i(personally) wont choose CSS3 animations for building similar content anytime in the near future:

-Works only on webkit browsers

-Performance is really bad on Chrome. Compared to most of the heavy weight flash content out there, this is just a very basic animation.

alabut
"It is extremely easy for developers to provide fallback content when Flash is not availble."

Really? How? I was an actionscripter for years before I dropped Flash from my arsenal and worked at a game company that would've loved to provide their games on systems without Flash.

jheriko
Its interesting, just a shame it works for nobody... er webkit users only and even then it looks glitchy (I used Chrome).
fredoliveira
give it a try in safari. I think you'll be amazed.