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Comment by jtangelder | Hacker News Reader

Wondering what the performance of a simple animated gif would be, instead of the composite layer transformations.

Or if you need to actually control it, an SVG or <canvas> based animation

If the bars are not related to actual data and are purely just pre-canned animation, the gif would just come with additional file size for a one time cached type of download. If the bars do need to be animated to real-time data coming in, then the gif would not be the right fit for that need.

Can't imagine anyone is deriving much information value from a visualizer with 3 bars. Apple Music has a similar animation and it will start bouncing when you click play, while the music is clearly downloading and there's no sound.

Just because it isn't useful to the user doesn't mean some dev hasn't spent the cycles doing it. I know I've personally had to write code that was an absolute waste, but some PM wanted and it was coded. Usually so it can be a bullet point in a demo that impresses low skilled PMs or sales drone, but techy user types just roll their eyes when it's pointed out to them.

I think a mic visualizer is very useful to the user. You can tell if you're quiet, clipping, or your mic straight up isn't working at all.

You've moved the goal posts. Nobody said an input levels indicator isn't useful. We're talking about this specific graphic not being a useful graphic for visualizing live data. You've wandered away from the pack here

This was true pre iOS 18. The bars respond to the music now (at least on iOS)!

Ah, look at that, so they do!

I've almost never seen these tiny icons to have any actual useful information being conveyed (meaning they are tracking amplitude or pitch). They're usually purely decorative, or boolean in function, meaning you can see they're flat if you are completely silent or they're bouncing around if not silent.

You can have 2 GIFs for "silent" and "sound happening" if one cares to truly indicate if it's picking up sound / playing sound, and switch between them. Will be 1000x simpler and 99% fewer lines of code to maintain forever.

And won't annoy people who get over-stimulated.

I don't normally have that issue, but one site had (has?) a bright green thing that jumped periodically that was so vastly distracting that I could not read the text on the page without covering the 'thing' somehow, eg with my hand! Absolutely pointless. I had to give up using the site entirely, even though it was otherwise useful.

If you use uBlock Origin on Firefox, it's very easy to remove that kind of annoyance using the "element zapper" mode. See:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-zapper

Personally, I'd be annoyed by both the resource-consuming animations and the blurry GIFs/canvas. Infisical does use the latter (canvas) for icons in their UI, and I somewhat hate it. I'd rather look at crisp, but static icons.

Canvas should never be blurry. If it is, something is doing a bilinear upscale. I'd guess someone forgot to take the scale factor of your display into account.

Or there are images being used in the canvas, which would defeat the purpose for the use case you described.

GIFs historically were pretty unoptimized from a display perspective (as anyone with a moderately-active Tumblr dashboard could tell you), so I wouldn't be surprised if it was worse.

I disagree. The height of a DOM element is much more expensive to recompute as this article shows than a single element which gets frames swapped out with static images. The latter can be guaranteed to never impact any other part of the document. The end result of either is that the pixels in the animated area need to be recomputed, and end result which will be the same for both, but a GIF will have no further impact on anything else whereas resizing DOM elements has side effects that have to be constantly updated and checked for which scale with the number of sprites you're animating (unlike the GIF bitmap which is gonna be 'flat rate').

Likewise, for a tiny animation, having the frames of the GIF in memory and blitting them onto the screen in sequence sounds like orders of magnitude less CPU/GPU than performing all the ridiculous math-based transforms over and over again.

The Tumblr example is not instructive here because those were frequently many many frames, very colorful (often photos), and/or large in dimensions, taking up a ton of memory which was probably the main problem causing our browsers to choke. This would be none of those things.

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