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> Even considering laptops and mobile power requirements, rendering off-screen and flipping is lightning fast

I believe it is not speed, but battery life. Most of the time nothing happens on the screen besides some small widget changing like once per second (e.g. clock), doing 59 full rerenders every second for that (or even more with high refresh rate screens) is significantly higher drain.

But I am absolutely not an expert on this.

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I think that's right. I started of just rendering everything on every requestAnimationFrame callback - and things rendered smoothly, especially when nothing needed copying to the GPU. But users complained that their laptop fans sprang into action and their battery life plummeted.

Your point is correct and there is another changing thing beyond the clock that's common - the blinking caret in a textbox. Firefox used to have really bad battery usage on macOS for a long time because in order to only change the caret you have to do a lot of things the Apple way.

Oh didn’t think of that! When you are more in control of the hardware then hardware planes could help with that - at least cursors in display managers are handled that way.

Does native OS frameworks have some escape hatch for these slightly changing, constantly damaging elements?

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