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Comment by pooriaazimi | Hacker News Reader

Nice hack (especially when you're clicking around), but what caught my eye was that maybe for the first time, Safari is actually waaay faster than Chrome or Firefox.

This is (roughly) the framerate I got when I tried it on the these three browsers (all latest versions, Windows Vista):

    Safari: 60 fps (or 30, or whatever "completely smooth" means)
    Chrome: 20 fps (compared to Safari)
    Firefox: 30 fps (compared to Safari)

But why? Chrome has always been the fastest (on Windows - on Mac, Safari is somewhat smoother for me)???

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From what I can tell, requestAnimationFrame in Chrome runs at a slower frame rate. I've had a similar experience with a plugin i'm writing. Maybe I was doing something wrong but requestAnimationFrame was firing once for every ~10 actual frames in Chrome.

Do you have chrome://flags -> "GPU compositing on all pages" set to enabled?

No, it was "Default".

I enabled it and... much to my surprise, the frame rate dropped significantly. It's now like 3 (three) frames per second (it's so slow I am able to actually count the frames!)

The "hover" animation (rainbow thing) is fine, 100% smooth. But the exploding animation is just ridiculously slow.

Then I set it to be disabled and the frame rate improved a little.

    Default: 20 fps
    GPU composition DISABLED: 10 fps
    GPU composition ENABLED: 3 fps

The machine I'm testing with is not particularly powerful, maybe that's the problem. 2 or 3 GBs of RAM, nVidia 9400 (or something like that).

A bit sad if that's “not particularly powerful” for animating a few letters on a freaking web page ... :-)

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