Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by typon 2669 days ago
Using Material design always feels so sluggish. Is it the shadows? Can someone with more CSS knowledge speculate about what's causing the high latency?
2 comments

It's the shadows and the unnecessary animations for every single interaction.
Last time I paid attention drop shadows were extremely expensive to render, and using too many of them would severely reduce the framerate when scrolling and animating elements. I stopped using them partly because of that, and partly because I find them garish anyway and I haven't found a situation where they improved usability more than just using slightly different colors for foreground and background. I know material design uses them to indicate z-level and to differentiate UI elements from content, I just don't think it's the only way to do so.