Barba.js – Create fluid and smooth transitions between your website’s pages

It’s barely functional in Safari on iOS.

More importantly, none of the suggested navigation patterns create any value for end users. Is there anyone who wished that web page navigation was slower, less predictable, and harder to discover?

A few observations:

1. I realize part of the purpose of this site is to demonstrate the functionality, but it would do that just as well if not better with subtler animations.

2. It’s quite disappointing that the site neither tones down the animations for prefers-reduced-motion, nor makes any mention of accessibility. What little discussion I found on GitHub was dismissive. Of course, users of the library can theoretically use it responsibly, but they probably won’t without some consideration directly built in to the library itself.

3. Subtler animations would probably also elicit less negativity. I know, it’s HN, and this kind of project showing up here has an proverbial “kick me” sign, but do I think it would get more positive attention.

4. Less important, but it looks like the project has been around for a while, so it’s not entirely surprising that it isn’t built around (a polyfill for) Shared Element Transitions[1]. I’d expect a library like that will have greater longevity. It is surprising not to see something like that under discussion at all.

To be honest, this site at Firefox/Android is slow and buggy. I would prefer quick loading times of plain old HTML files over plain old HTML, but I acknowledge that this is not sexy.

I would like this if it were merely hiding latency - that is, if the time for loading the next page weren't affected

This probably means doing the http request and the DOM layout while the animation is still running

I’m trying not to be overly negative here, but:

I had a really hard time figuring out how to use the home page.

I went to a website listed in the showcase. It took over 20 seconds to load to interactivity, and I’m on a high speed 250Mbps connection. Once I found my way into a list of recipes, I noticed it completely stole scroll focus – the page scrolled too fast, going out of sync with my finger.

I am not impressed by what I saw during my demo. It doesn’t feel like this project is helping deliver good user experiences.

Please don't build sites like this unless you're trying to demonstrate some one-off creativity.

I love it! Works fantastic under Brave (nee Chrome). I'll consider adding it to my arsenal. I can think of plenty of intro/outro use cases!