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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

It seems to stutter a lot. I'm continually amazed that 9.2 billion clock cycles per second + GPU isn't enough to render a webpage animation smoothly.

Other than that, looks really cool! I particularly like the background blur. We're starting to see some really cool effects with CSS3.

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Works fine for me but it's not 60fps. Animation and graphics in javascript will never be good. I can't wait for the native app model to come to PC's so we can stop shoehorning all this crap into html/javascript which it was never designed to support.

In this example the animation and effects aren't using javascript, the javascript is just is just firing the events. CSS3 (as implemented here) can leverage the same general advantages as a native app (GPU acceleration, etc). It's still early days, so browsers are various levels of implementation support, but the point is that moving forward it's not crippled by the same limitations of javascript DOM manipulation; vendors can actually optimize the software and hardware support.

I'd say it's quite likely animation and graphics in the browser (not specifically javascript) WILL be good.

Low-level access to memory, cpu, and graphics(through opengl or directx bindings) are all needed to approach what the hardware is capable of. Pipeline bottlenecks are the real performance killers. Vendors can spend decades trying to fix them one by one, but there's no real substitute for low-level access.

Erm, don't we already have a "native app model" for PCs?

We have it. It's called WPF.

It's really weird like that. I remember playing around with CSS3 with some gloss, gradients, and rounded borders, and something like nine boxes with the effects applied just ruined your browser. I had no idea what to do about it at the time, and as it was just me playing around, I decided to abandon it.

There are some really weird bottlenecks in writing websites that are still beyond me.

Works fine for me, Chrome Win7. I only have integrated graphics, too.

Works perfectly fine for me.

(Linux Mint 13, Xinerama, Chrome)

It's fine on my machine.

It's a software problem, not a hardware problem. Probably just your browser.

Our frontend guy had a lot of issues with animation performance on the different browsers recently, he could probably speak to how big of a pain in the ass it is.

I'm on a Windows machine right now (ugh), and only Safari 5 renders it absolutely smoothly. Chrome and Firefox (latest versions) fail miserably (Chrome is something like 15 fps with a 500 ms lag at the beginning, Firefox at 20 fps).

This is the first time I've seen Chrome performing worse than Safari on Windows (they're usually on par, with Chrome a little better sometimes).

More info in case it's useful to OP: Windows Vista, latest service pack I presume. 2.53 Core 2 Duo, a 4 year old graphics card (quite good for its day, but naturally not so hot these days), 4 or 5 gigs of RAM.

I gave it a shot in Safari (instead of Chrome). Worked better, but still not perfectly lucid. I'm on a RMBP with GPU active. Anyone else with this configuration having stuttering?

'11 MBP and it's smooth as butter... thinking about it though perhaps JS support at that resolution is pushing it too hard.

Chrome 21 on the rMBP is incredibly under-optimized. I've switched to using Chrome Canary and browsing is much more fluid.

iOS+Mac Safari, Chrome are okay. Firefox is sort of ok. Opera not so much. Webkit seems to be doing a good job.

(checked on iPad, iPhone , MacBook air, iMac)

It's almost perfect on my machine. (Same as yours.)

Perfectly smooth on a '12 MBA under chrome.

It works fine on my iPhone4 too.

Seriously? As in if you recorded a video and looked at each frame, every one would be distinct from the previous frame? Why can't a RMBP run it then?

The rMBP's graphics card is, from my understanding, somewhat underpowered given the number of pixels it has to push. I've heard fairly widespread reports of its framerate in graphics-intensive situations being less than desirable.

The iPhone or MBA, on the other hand, have far fewer pixels to push around.

Also, it seemed totally smooth on my mid-2010 iMac running 10.8.1 with Safari 6.

It's probably due to most browser rendering engines not being tuned to handle that kind of resolution.

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