[bhauer]

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. :)

[janerik]

;) 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.

[MBCook]

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.

[Mister_Snuggles]

It does a fantastic job of pegging one CPU!

[bhauer]

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.

[rsynnott]

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.

[bhauer]

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.

[rsynnott]

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