[nhebb]

I've seen two variants of parallax - parallax scrolling (which is fine) and parallax videos that play behind text. When you're trying to read text, having a moving image behind the text makes it harder to read. It looks cool, but it's a bad design. And not just for the readability issues, but also due to the loading. For example, PayPal has it on their front page now. I used to be able to go to PayPal and immediately click the login button. Now I have to wait for the loading to finish. It's annoying.

[jmathai]

I find parallax scrolling to be ineffective. Call me old school but it takes a well understood action (scrolling) and overloads it to perform animations. Animations which often times do not add much value besides "flair". An ineffective tradeoff in my opinion.

And yes, videos behind text is absurd :).