Allow disabling of motion or animation

This does have the effect of making Firefox buggy and not showing the content at the top of a page before you scroll down and up again. Which only works on sites you can scroll on.

For example, try to distinguish (from "definitely should be blocked" to "definitely can't be blocked without breaking things"):

- An ad mascot hopping up or down telling you to click it

- A loading spinner spinning

- A progress bar

- Information you're waiting for being loaded once some process completes

You could disable all CSS animations and GIFs, but that will kill the loading spinner and risks that the next ad mascot will be written in JavaScript. And it will still not stop one of the biggest offenders in terms of blinking, ads that are being replaced by a new ad every 30 seconds.

1. Maybe in 100 years, when we have powerful AI that and reliably identify problematic animation.

If it matters, it should happen by itself unless someone turns it off.

I don't really think you can force people to use a restrictive animation API (and nothing else) since it would have to generalize over all animation needs. Meanwhile, on iOS, SwiftUI is very far from generalizing over all needs—as an example of what a restrictive set of tools might look like. I don't think it's even possible, and the imperative kit will always have to exist.

...which basically all of them will naturally do, because their goals are almost certainly not going to be aligned with yours.

I was using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-transition... which operates on the same principle.

You can try yourself it breaks the google login form. You don't need an account to try: just "login", enter a random address, and watch the password prompt not being enabled as it waits for the transition to complete.

Similarly, slack breaks doing random actions that have some blur animation you often don't notice. It's usually always a consequence of transitions and animations that are chained with JS events.

I tried myself to come up with some attributes that would be more robust (just as reducing the step count instead of disabling the animation completely), but nothing has worked in a reliable way.

Count me in as one of the folks that hates animations in UIs, so I would really love to hear if anybody has a solution to this.

...the fact that it's called "legacy" is ominous and a sign of things to come. The fact that other browsers have been quite aggressive at slowly destroying any real form of user-controlled customisation is quite telling too. (For exmaple, did you know that IE supported user stylesheets all the way up to its last version, but Edge no longer does? And Chrome removed that functionality over half a decade ago.)

I want websites to manage this tradeoff for me when I zoom or resize my browser window.

I’m tempted to start a gallery a la Plain Text Offenders or js;dr.

> “look at my mad skills”

I’m torn about this: there are enough unneeded and horrible animations that I completely understand this point of view of wanted to get rid of all of them.

I also see that as throwing the baby with the bath water. There’s also fundamentally useful and informative animations to tell you something changed, what you’re supposed to do with an element or even what type of content you’re looking at.

As an unintentional experiment, when I got my new phone a few weeks ago I checked “disable animations” first and foremost, and started using the device normally. And everytime I was doing a specific action the screen froze with a round arrow. It took me 5 min to understand that page and app transitions where, well, “animations”, and getting rid of them made for a broken experience.

Same for popups and dialogs. Did it come from the top of the screen or from somewhere else in the app ? If you saw the animation you’d understand it immediately, before even parsing the design of the popup or the content.

I think we’re far away from the time where animations where random animated gifs with no meaning, and platforms are mature enough to use them in more advanced and useful ways most of the time.

The rule is that you should never have to wait for a UI animation - That said, UI animations done correctly, which are subtle and extremely short, do enhance perception of UI controls state and transitions. But I can't blame people for the broad hate towards animation on the web, so much of it is done poorly in a way that detracts from the overall experience.

It's hard to tell for sure where it's just a happy coincidence and where it is a pretext to make it either more appealing or to force people to do it under some other requirement, but you see this everywhere

- Some hostile "optimization" ideas by airlines getting nixed by safety arguments, certainly not at all influenced (/s) by the humans working at those regulators not wanting other humans to be subjected to that

- Animal rights activists using climate change as the main argument because it's a more popular topic now

- People trying to ban technical terms like "blacklist"/"whitelist" claiming the goal is more precise terminology

I'm sure there are plenty more examples.

> What about those of us that see no need of user interface elements that flollop about doing some kind of 'me Me ME!' dance, when we just want to get things done?

If it’s a hindrance to you getting things done—to your access—that’s an accessibility issue. Accessibility that benefits you doesn’t imply anything about you, it’s an affordance for you to get whatever you need out of that access.

For example: video transcripts might be a benefit for people with auditory and/or visual impairments. But they also benefit me because I prefer not to consume video content the vast majority of the time. They help me access content I’d otherwise probably never consume. That’s… accessibility too!

Sadly we live in a world where developer time is a cost, and the cost of respecting user preferences is way down the list of things to spend cash/time on ... unless, of course, an A/B test showing that common courtesy leads to better conversions gets deployed and runs to significance.

Saying that, I don't believe we should give up on the fight to better respect our users' preferences. For my part, I've designed my JS library in a way to make it as easy as possible for developers to build interactive 2d canvas-based graphics that are as respective of user choices as possible[1][2][3]. If nothing else, it demonstrates to other developers that such things are not impossible to achieve.

[1] - https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/project/full/AMVKPx - Accessible stacked bar, and line, charts

[2] - https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/project/full/AzWnNa - Header text colorise and animate effects (respects prefers-color-scheme, prefers-reduced-motion, etc)

[3] - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/learn/eleventh-lesson - tutorial on how to make the 2d canvas more accessible/respective of user choices

Whenever somebody tells me they want a new phone because their old one is slow, I recommend disabling all animations. After that they usually just keep their phone because it feels like it's new again.

Framing it as an accessibility issue makes it harder to remove.

I agree with counter points showing how animation can add useful context, particularly in response to user interactions. This fails to address the crux of the issue greenbit brings up: the 'me Me ME!' dance. Yes, there are some places animation is indispensable, but the problem is that 95% of them (and their ilk) are giving the other 5% a bad name. The best way to enjoy and maintain focus is to not have to be constantly on-guard for hijack attempts.

Add in the fact that so many things exhibit this behavior (animations just tend to be the worst), multiply by how many sites/apps you spend time with. Even major, paid products can be problematic. With the web, ads, newsletter/don't-go/"privacy"/etc pop-ups are bad enough already.

I think we can take things a step/leap further: icon/logo/front-page take-overs and how aggressively those are pushed in front of user eyeballs. I believe (citation wanted!) that publishing control over the Google doodles is subject to a very strict approval process to curate a very specific, subtle "experience". It has to be the most valuable space of virtual real estate in the world, even despite limitations. It's certainly the most obnoxious to me.

So if there is to be general agreement on how things improve, I'd rather it be based on something broader than accessibility, but if accessibility wins some ground I'd appreciate it nonetheless.

But I do have to accept that this makes the app look less "polished" or "modern" at a first glance and likely makes some people look at competitors when they come to evaluate the app.

This is somewhat similar to gyms (bear with me here): a newbie will choose a gym based on how many machines they have. An experienced person doing strength training knows that the only thing that matters is how many racks they have. Gyms know that, hence the large numbers of largely useless machines (and a very limited number of squat racks and barbells, because strength trainers are the worst customers to have: they actually do go to the gym). The decision to subscribe is being made based on the superficial.

These in-between states gives us well-needed information and are not artistic at all. Sure, they can be emulated badly, but for example iphone’s app switcher is imo a very natural implementation of how it should be done. Won’t make the action take any more time, but it does instruct on what happens very accurately. Compare it to i3’s instant desktop switching, which gives us barely any info to work with.

Instead, it explains there is accessibility issue and teaches how to fix that.

I don't know why desktop mice are still stuck in this 80s era of jittery scrolling while trackpads and phones have been scrolling with pixel perfect accuracy for over a decade. And now every product page is tying animations to scroll position which looks great on smooth scroll devices but play as 1fps animations for mice users.