[gronglo]

> In 99% of cases I do not care at all about the "artistic vision" of the UI designer and in the other 1% of cases (say an in-browser game or some useful data-viz) I could choose to allow the tab to go crazy with my resources.

I'm with you 100%. Although I'd go one step further and say CSS just isn't needed at all, and should be removed from all browsers. Same goes for WebGL (if you want to play a game, download Steam).

This would fix all of your issues and save an unbelievable amount of energy across the planet. Unfortunately people like us are a dying breed!

[groundcontr01]

No css at all is pretty extreme, but I'd be on board with disabling css animations

[valenterry]

That's very very sad. Animations can make UX much better when used correctly.

[adastra22]

…how? How do they improve the user experience, at all?

[whstl]

Answering because I know the answer, even though I disagree:

There are some situations where having some animation can "attract attention" to parts of the UI, for guidance ("there's some info text here"), feedback ("operation complete"), state changes, timing. All this of course doesn't apply to decorative animations.

With that said: a lot of the situations I mention above are manufactured. They are often because of changes happening away from the mouse, or because the interface is brittle or too slow, and the user doesn't have confidence that something really happened, or because the organization of elements is not functional and things are too far apart that the user might miss something in a totally different part of the screen.

IMO, with enough thinking you can come up with alternative interfaces that don't require animations at all.

[gronglo]

Imagine a list of 10 items that gets shuffled so that the order is completely rearranged. With no animation, it would take a lot of additional cognitive load to find where each item went. With animation, your brain would track the general movement of each item much more easily.

Basically, animation provides additional information about object state. Removing that extra information increases cognitive load.

This isn't to say all animations are useful. Many animations are excessive or completely unnecessary, which is probably what has given you a negative view of them.

[gf000]

Absolutely, without question. Do you think that humans, who evolved in a physical word where basically everything happens in an incremental way don't extract valuable information from in-flight state?

Also, as an example just try to use a window manager that just switches instantly to a new desktop, vs a very short animation. I find the former easily disorienting, and it is even more so when you have a more direct gesture controlling the action (e.g. touch or mousepad). Of course there is too much of everything, and too much animation sucks, no question. So is too much fat, but that doesn't make normal amounts any bad.

[adastra22]

People are different, I guess. I remove those animations whenever I can. A desktop manager that switches virtual displays in a single frame is exactly what I want.

[valenterry]

This is what I meant.

[ulrikrasmussen]

I disagree. The first thing I do on a new phone is to disable all animations. It makes the phone feel so much faster.

[valenterry]

I'm doing something similar. I set them all to 2x the speed. That is much better than disabling them imo.

[7bit]

You can disable CSS in your browser. The fact that you even complain about this tells me that you didn't didable, yet you damned it to be removed. Pretty hypocritical of you.