Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TheChaplain 4 days ago
Not often you encounter a site that makes scrolling choppy.
6 comments

I'm pretty sure that's because the entire <main> of the site has an 8px Gaussian blur on it:

  .site-main[data-astro-cid-bpoqdqeq] { 
    backdrop-filter:blur(8px); 
  }
Why, exactly? The page looks visually identical when I disable that rule, but the performance skyrockets. I realize that it's probably vibecoded, but come on.
For $DEITY sake, this surprised me. Such inadequate performance on a 9800x3d + RX9070XT. How? Don't people test anything anymore?

Damn.

does it not affect the vignette effect? i can't test it (on the phone) but performance seems fine for me (and i have js jit disabled lol)

yes they should have tested the site on firefox, but idk i wouldn't expect css gaussian blur of all things to cause slowdowns in some browsers

> i wouldn't expect css gaussian blur of all things to cause slowdowns in some browsers

Gaussian blurs are extremely performance intensive. They need to be calculated for every individual pixel, and the per-pixel computation involves averaging the colors of dozens or hundreds of adjacent pixels. This site applies it to the entire <main>, which spans the entire screen's width and height on mobile, which means that it has several million pixels. That's fine if the browser only has to calculate it once, but when you're scrolling the browser has to perform those calculations for every single pixel on every single frame.

Apparently Chromium and Safari downscale the sampled texture which makes it less accurate but more performant, but Firefox doesn't do that because it prioritizes accuracy over performance, which explains why it only stutters on Firefox.

Firefox by any chance?

Ran recently into another site on here that scrolled fine on anything except Firefox. And this one seems to be fine on safari.

Firefox Android is fine albeit laggy. I don't get why one has to customize scroll behavior but I don't do mobile UX myself.
Last time i checked it's not laggy because they messed with the scroll, but because of some fancy CSS that firefox has trouble with.
Works great in my browser that hasn't been updated - except by me, mainly to keep it running - in about 10 years.
Samsung browser on Android, regularly smooth.
it's slop which is notoriously willing to fuck with scroll

don't fuck with scroll

Chrome too
It's even fucked with JavaScript disabled.