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Comment by janerik | Hacker News Reader

A moving background makes it easy to read! Thumbs up!

Indeed! Glad you like it.

Jokes aside, if you hate it, you can turn it off at the bottom right. Maybe some day I'll disable it by default. But for now, I kind of enjoy these responses. Edit: very well, it's disabled by default. :)

I'm sorry but when I can't scroll without horrible lag because someone decided to make a distracting background, it's a serious usability problem.

;) I did not see the "normal background" link on my first visit. I already instapaper'd the article. Let's see if I can add a more serious comment after I read it.

It does a fantastic job of pegging one CPU!

Yeah, I've noticed that Chrome is especially bad since it still does very little to GPU-accelerate SVG. Frankly, one reason I had left it enabled for so long was to make a point about Chrome's bad GPU+SVG support. Why should it be necessary to use the CPU to move a semi-circle?

But in any case, I'd rather not distract from the points I'm trying to make in the blog entry, so the background is now off by default.

Where does it actually run well? It doesn't peg a core on Safari, but scrolling still feels laggy and unpleasant. I initially assumed you'd implemented your own inertial scrolling, as with old Google mobile sites.

It runs well on all my PCs, which admittedly are all Windows. It's just an SVG+SMIL animation. My opinion is that in 2013, it should run entirely on the GPU. But I acknowledge that's not the case as much as I think it should be.

On my box, it uses ~2.1% CPU and ~16% GPU in Aurora.

Ah, yep; it actually works quite acceptably in Firefox. Very unpleasant in Chrome and Safari, though.

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