Re: The ability to turn off animations in browsers

Gabor,

your idea is fantastic even though I personally found the motivation a bit
"much".

It is a good idea to give users the option to turn animations off. Full
stop.

I see some people are worried about how users will find this out but there
is no reason to worry about this, laptops, netbooks and such already make
their power profiles known and browsers could respond to this by
automatically turning off animations when a device is on low power or in
power-savings mode.

However I do think the problem is twofold, there is one part where your
idea of adding a globally accessible variable for javascript, which is good
but does sadly depend on implementations by frameworks and will never catch
old unmaintained hand-written animations (god even I might still have a few
of those out there).

This is something we can probably never change.

The other part is that CSS3 transitions are becoming more prevalent. Both
in javascript frameworks relegating to the browsers in lieu of their old
setInterval/setTimeout ways but also in the case of people writing them
ourselves.

I think browser makers can implement this setting directly in the way they
handle CSS3 transitions but I do not know how this will pan out for
developers who do not take into account handling certain cases gracefully
(there is probably some code out there which assumes a certain thing to
last a certain time and then does something else).

Regards,

Simon de Vlieger


On 12 June 2013 11:07, Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk> wrote:

> So, now that we've had a go at venting about "web designers" who use all
> our CPU for animations and scripts, and advertisers for pushing wasteful
> video our way (not just in the browser, but also in unrelated technologies
> like Skype's native client) - and I'm surprised the old "dark websites use
> less power on my CRT than bright websites" - the more fundamental question:
>
> Why is this being discussed on www-html? Are we proposing some change to
> HTML that will solve these issues?
>
> If we're saying "we'd like a setting in browsers that allows users to
> suppress animations, scripts running in the background, video/audio content
> autostarting, etc" then should this kind of request not be directed at
> individual browser manufacturers? Or is there some new
> element/meta/HTTP-header we're trying to come up with here?
>
>
> P
> --
> Patrick H. Lauke
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