Frosted Glass/Panel Effect, Cross Browser Solution, Vanilla JavaScript and CSS | Hacker News Reader

Frosted Glass/Panel Effect, Cross Browser Solution, Vanilla JavaScript and CSS

github.com

48 pointsfrosted-panel22 comments

Safari can do this with one CSS rule: https://webkit.org/blog/3632/introducing-backdrop-filters/

This was recently implemented in Chromium-based browsers (M76) too. https://web.dev/backdrop-filter has some more information about the CSS, and https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5679432723333120 has more information about the implementation.

And this is landing very soon in Firefox, behind a pref. https://twitter.com/svoisen/status/1159322370122768384

As of yet, the browser support for this is very shoddy. Not to mention outdated/legacy browsers like IE.

That's one of the worst images you could choose to demo this. You can barely see anything blurred because the cloudless sky is just a gradient.

For the most part it is fine, apart from the "auto auto" breakpoint.

edit: Demo is changed slightly on smaller screens to better demonstrate the blur.

As of BETA_v1.6 is should be working in most Safari versions, excluding the very old one's that don't support SVG or flexbox! I do not know about Firefox focus, but I have changed a few things that I think could have made it work in that browser too.

Things changed:

- Reverted back to using xlink:href rather than href attribute within the image element (the newer href attr was not supported in Safari)

- Added two new attributes inside the filter element:

1) filterRes (needed for Safari to display the blur on page load without being prompted by a resize)

2) color-interpolation-filters (some older versions of Safari were using a different variation of this filter and the blur effect would't look right)

- Autoprefixed main.css for older browser compatibility

there are a few of these libraries but as far as i can tell they are just hacks that only work with a background image, and are thus not a drop in replacement for backdrop-filter. a replacement for blur maybe.

All of the libraries I have seen seem to just be jquery libraries that apply a blur CSS effect to DOM elements. This is NOT supported very well accross different browsers.

Frosted Panel is a cross browser solution which allows you to have a full scale, centered, background-image with a responsive, blurry panel overlapping it, of which you can put whatever content you would like inside.

It works by taking advantage of SVG filters, which are supported in most (if not all) browsers, while panning and zooming a duplicate SVG image of the original background-image in order to mimic the actual background-image of the body tag.

nice, thanks for the details

Nice - though the effect doesn't seem to work on iOS Safari (iPhone XS).

Updated, please try the demo now: https://cryptodescriptor.github.io/frosted-panel

Why support Internet Explorer?

Also the extra element attributes are not 'data-' attributes and will not validate as HTML5.

Webkit/Blink/Firefox on mobile/desktop is all there in the referred to article. Edge is soon to be Webkit so for me the target browser list is not as extensive as for some. IE is depreciated and was never HTML5.

Can we just have this smaller list of browsers, CSS only and HTML5 valid with no warnings?

Apart from that, great work!

I should probably follow the spec, but I think having "data-" prepended to every custom attribute on the frosted-panel div will take up unnecessary space.

Why support IE you ask? Why not? Some clients force their devs to support legacy browsers such as Internet Explorer.

Wouldn't this also be possible without javascript by nesting HTML inside SVG?

Only if you wanted the whole page blurred, in this instance we want only a small part of the background image blurred, so we have to do all sorts of fancy panning and zooming to the SVG image so we can mimic the movement of the actual background-image.

Frosted Panel is a cross-browser compatible library written in pure Javascript to achieve a responsive "Frosted Glass" effect.

This is a cool effect. One thing about your marketing though... “Cross-browser” should include mobile browsers. At least on iOS Safari it’s not working. If you haven’t handled testing the major browsers yet, you should refrain from using that as a key selling point.

What version of iOS are you using? It works for me on iOS 12.3.1

Safari should now be working in all versions that support flexbox and svg images with filters! Please read the new reply I made to this thread for more information.

Same for me. Also doesn’t work on Firefox Focus on mobile.

Confirmed to be working in Firefox Focus.

The panel was located in a bad place for demonstrating the blur effect on smaller screens because there was just blue sky with nothing else going on, therefore I have changed the height dimension to 80% so it covers the snowboard and better demonstrates the effect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com