Which ways are there to give images a blur effect? - javascript

I'm a little bit stuck here..
This is the page I'm working on:
The issue I'm having is that the images in the 'In der Nähe'-box on the right seam to have a blur effect on them. And I can't figure out where that is coming from.
I suspect CSS, or JS since when opening the images in a new tab, they show as bright as they are:
Usually Firebug, or Chrome Dev Tools help me finding the origin of such issues, but in this case I can't find any opacity or filter attribute in there.
What am I missing? What other ways are there to give a blur effect to an image?

There's an opacity: 0.7 rule on the entire div; the one of class notes.

As Lightness Races in Orbit (what a mouthful!) points out, there an opacity: 0.7 on the class .notes BUT that is not everything. All those images are upscaled. I.e. there actual size is smaller than the rendered size. This may cause the image to be less sharp than it should.

Related

Google Chrome hardware acceleration/css scale causes faulty compositing

The background:
I am making a 2D HTML/CSS animation using JQuery. This will place roughly 25 same-sized images on top of each other, moving some as desired. UI elements get a pixel position and are much smaller than the full-sized images. I have recently moved from forcing hardware acceleration form backface-visibility: hidden to will-change css properties. The entire animation is scaled by the div it is contained in and the css transform property.
The problem:
In Google Chrome specifically, the compositing starts malfunctioning in certain scenes, in a reproduceable but seemingly random manner. Images are partly cut off, images are placed behind images they are supposed to be on top of, the like. Scrolling up and down replaces some malfunctions with others, as does changing the display properties of some items (happens due to UI interaction).
The question:
What is causing this behaviour, why are all my other test browsers (firefox, opera, internet explorer, edge) not affected, and how can I avoid it?
My current status:
From what I have tried so far and my gut feeling this is an issue caused by overuse of hardware acceleration or the transform: scale css property, or a combination of both. I'm currently working on other scaling methods as the easiest "fix" to the problem, but I still do not know what is causing all of this. Sadly all of my UI elements aren't a neat % of the parent.
What I tried:
Firstly I tried setting the z-index for all elements manually. This accomplished nothing, sadly.
As sometimes scrolling up/down or interacting with the UI seemed to fix problems, I tried adding a method that would force the browser to re-do the layout at certain points in code. This argueably only made things worse, as it added a lot of white flickering, and failed to fix the issue.
I tried switching animation libraries from jquery to velocity, which did not help.
I removed the "hack" that forced things into hardware acceleration. This fixed the compositing problem, but reintroduced choppy animations in chrome (only).
I then tried to assign hardware acceleration on a need-to-get basis by adding and removing a css class containing the "hack". The behaviour was the same as in 4 .
I tried using will-change instead of the backface visibility hack, but this just set the behaviour back to where it was before I started my attempts at fixing this.
I tried reducing the amount of layers while keeping hardware acceleration. I used jquerys ".hide()" on elements only animating once replaced the final picture with a singular image. This did not fix the issue of composite "mashup".
Finally, I disabled the css transform scale property, which fixed the unexpected behaviour, but is imperative so I can scale my animation for screen size.
Some code:
Here's some css code of the animation container
.animationContainer {
position: relative;
width:2560px;
height:1440px;
/*transform: scale(0.55);*/
transform-origin: top left;
overflow: hidden;
display: inline-block;
}
And some javascript detailing the animation I use for the majority of objects, making them "fall" into the scene
function fadein(el, direct)
{
var falldistance = 150;
$(el).show();
$(el).css("opacity", 0.0);
switch(direct) {
case 0:
$(el).css("top", "-="+falldistance);
$(el).animate(
{
top: "+="+falldistance,
opacity: 1.0
}, 1000);
break;
[...]
I do not know how useful more code would be, if you require any more please ask. Web design isn't a field I have much experience in, and I am slowly running out of ideas. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
Example Visual:
This is an example of one of the bugs:
This is what it looks like after scrolling down and back up in the browser:

Chrome cutting off border & other visual glitches

I suspect this has to do with some bugs in the browser, involving opacity, transitions and translations.
I wasn't able to reproduce the glitch in a code snippet, so I'll have to point you to the live site:
tzork.com
My full source code is here: MightyPork/tzork, including the SCSS and Typescript that's compiled to CSS and JS. If you have time and can reproduce the bug, I'd be most grateful if you tried to find what's wrong. I've never seen anything quite like this before.
When you put mouse over the labels, they get a background and a border on one side, which should be 2px wide. Sometimes though, Chrome shows just one pixel. When I change the width to 1px, sometimes it shows no border at all (only near the corners).
You can clearly see how inconsistent it gets. My browser zoom is at 100%, so that is not the cause.
I'm not sure what's up, but it apparently depends on the current time = angle = position of the labels, and WINDOW SIZE.
I round the position to nearest pixel, so fractional position is not the cause.
I also tried rounding to odd / even pixel, that but didn't help either.
Another issue is that in Firefox, sometimes hovering the labels causes numbers on the clock face to move / change letter spacing. I don't get it, there's no connection at all.
In chrome sometimes there appear weird tiling glitch on the background image (notably when the dev tools panel is open).
Ok, so the solution:
I added this all over the place, and the render glitches have disappeared.
-webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0);
I don't get it.

Rendering bug in Google Chrome at certain window widths

My users and I are running into a rendering glitch in Chrome only (on both Windows and Mac) where an overlaid div that I'm using for on-hover tooltip-style "popouts"(see first image below) does not get rendered properly in certain cases (see second image below). In all other browsers I've tested, it works as expected.
Here's how the hover popouts are supposed to look (and what happens in Firefox, Safari, IE):
Here's what happens in Chrome:
You can see it in action on this site if you look at May 24 using a browser window width of ~ 1200px (significnatly wider or narrower windows do not seem to work). The glitch only affects the popouts in the bottom right of the menu that are popping left, e.g. those on May 24. Hovers using the same exact mechanism higher up in the page work just fine. Glitched popouts are invisible (except for part of the carat), but if you click on the link to lock the popout in place and then hold left click while moving your mouse around as if to "select text" in the area where the popout should be, it will then render partially. Also if I open dev tools and try to select the popout, it will render just fine at that point.
I've been looking at this all day and trying different work arounds with opacity, z-index, etc. and getting nowhere. Does this glitch ring any bells for anyone? Is there a way to force Chrome to render the div, once its been positioned and unhidden? I'm fine with any work-around or hack.
I use a custom (and fairly complicated) jquery plugin for popouts. If it would be helpful to see the non-minified javascript for the plugin, I can post or provide a link to that, but general guidance that leads me to a work around will be sufficient to be accepted as an answer.
Edit: My Browser Build: 26.0.1410.65
(Per my comments)
This does indeed seem to be a bug in Chrome, though without a smaller test case to reproduce it, it could be very hard to track down. You may want to report it to the Chrome team with as much information as possible.
In support of my "it's a bug" assertion:
The hidden/clipped elements become visible when they are selected.
The elements underneath the hidden/clipped elements are not clickable.
This indicates that z-index and height is correct.
It only happens under very specific circumstances; the rest of the items with the same style work fine. The same item may work fine at a slightly bigger/smaller screen width.
Applying a 3D transform fixes it.
The problem goes away when I apply a CSS transform such as scale3d or translate3d. I imagine this is because certain CSS properties cause the browser to switch to GPU acceleration.
In this case, switching to the fast path for rendering seems to alter the drawing sequence enough to fix the problem.
Super hacky but this fixes it for me:
$('.drop-link.food').on('hover',function() {
$('.tool-tip').css('overflow', 'hidden').height();
$('.tool-tip').css('overflow', 'auto');
});
Obviously this isn't a "good" solution, and even remaining hacky you could probably optimize it to only force the redraw on the tooltip it needs to, but hopefully it helps...
Another clue:
$('.drop-link').on('hover',function() {
$(this).siblings('.tool-tip').css('display','block');
});
This won't fix it right away, but it seems like if this is there, once you've hovered on something, it will work the next time you hover on it.
Not sure if this helps with your situation, but over the last couple of days I've started to notice that certain site elements on Facebook and Weight Watchers no longer show up. Specifically it seems to be affecting items that (I believe) to be controlled by or dependent on Javascript. When I call up these sites in Firefox and Safari they work as expected.

Repaint slowdown with CSS via Javascript in webkit browsers

I've been working on a slideshow script that uses CSS3 transitions, or jQuery's animate when they are unavailable. I've created a custom function to do the slide animations, which does so appropriately. Everything seemed to be working fine, but I've hit a major snag during testing.
For one reason or another, there is an large delay applying the jQuery CSS before and after the transition on large slideshows. For example, the slideshow in the link below is around 9900 pixels wide (container width, most of which is hidden). The container is maneuvered to display the appropriate slide, using CSS3 transition and transform properties. The delay occurs applying the CSS between lines 75 - 82 in the paste below. In particular, applying the 'transition' CSS causes the problem. Add the 'transition' CSS to the stylesheet (rather than applying it with JS), and delay disappears. This isn't really a solution however, because we only want to use CSS3 transitions on specific properties, that can vary (using 'all' in the stylesheet would transition some CSS that we don't want to animate, but change regularly).
Animation function:
http://pastebin.com/9wumQvrP
Slideshow Demo:
http://www.matthewruddy.com/demo/?p=2431
The real problem is with iOS, in which the slideshow (and even the browser sometimes) becomes completely un-usable. I can't pinpoint any errors, and have really exhausted my knowledge of debugging JS. I'm sure it is related to this section of the function after playing around a bit, and disabling CSS3 support within the plugin altogether removes the problem completely.
I'm completely stuck, and really appreciate any help anyone can give.
--- Edit ---
I've tried applying the CSS with native Javascript rather than jQuery's .css function. Same results, no better performance. Also worth noting that this isn't happening at all in Firefox, and seems to only be a problem with Webkit browsers.
Anyone with a solution, would happy to make a donation towards a few beers! I really cannot figure this out!
--- Second Edit ---
Ok, so been debugging and I can see that the slowdown is caused by the browser repaint cycle that is taking a very long time. Is there a better way to handle this that the way it is already doing? Positioning the element absolutely is a known way to reduce repaints, but that isn't really working because the slideshow is responsive. Absolutely positioning the slide images or the slides themselves causes it to collapse.
--- Third Edit ---
A day later, and I've made some progress. Adding 'transition: all 0s ease' to the elements stylesheet CSS has gotten rid of the repaint caused by adding the inline CSS transition property via the custom animation function mentioned in the original post. This causes a significant performance gain, especially when removing the inline CSS transition property when the transition itself has finished.
Good stuff! However, now there is still a slowdown when the inline CSS translate is being removed (that was used to create the hardware accelerated transition effect itself) after the transition, and the left positioning is being applied. When the two happen together, there is a slowdown.
Breaking them up into two separate tasks (the translate removed, then the left position added in a setTimeout with no time specified), again gets rid of the repaints = performance gain, and looks likes problem solved. But sometimes, the CSS transition property isn't get negated fast enough, and the translate removal gets animated. No good, and don't know where to look next to work around it.
I think the problem is you're loading HUGE images :)
They are too big for the container you have them in, so you scale them down, which is even more resource intensive.
Try resizing them.
First of all congrats for your debugging!
I have been working on the exact same stuff lately and found out that ios devices don't support a large number of images positionned in the same page. It causes crashes and the only solution I found was removing elements instead of just hiding them. The downside is that removing and appending elements causes lags so you have to do it cleverly, when your transitions are done. I thought the best way to go was keep 3 or 5 images in the DOM and replacing the rest with thumbnails of the images, resized to fit the original. When transitions are done, I'd just put the large images back into place...
Hope this helps you a bit on the ios problem at least...
After spending some time analysing your code TimeLine with Chrome Dev Tools, I believe there's some optimization you could do.
As far as I can tell, every single one of your 16 images gets fully repainted every time an animation is requested. This seems quite obvious to me, as there are 16 images in your example, and the Chrome Dev Tools reports 16 long "Paint" executions every time in hit "Next".
In my humble opinion, you should figure out a solution that considers only translating two images: the one you want to hide and the one you want to show. So, consider please, not moving the rest of the images and, instead, leaving them all side-by-side to the shown image.
One more thing, using scaled down images is probably making the paint cycles quite longer. Avoid them whenever you can.
Well, think I've managed to figure it out! Just so you know, original post links don't reflect the changes as I've done them on my localhost environment.
Absolutely positioning the slides container has fixed the problem that was occurring with repaint speeds after the transition had taken place (whilst applying CSS properties). Obviously taking them out of the DOM has done the trick, allowing painting to take place much more efficiently.
I originally didn't try this too much because I knew this would add a lot of work to the resizing functionality. I had originally intended to not resize at all in JS, and rely on percentages to do the dirty work. Absolutely positioning the container would cause the slideshow viewport to collapse, rendering the native resizing useless.
However, I was already having problems with sub-pixel rendering in other browsers anyway, so I guess it was time to bite the bullet and rely on fixed pixel values. I then used JS to handle the resizing, using the window resize event. All seems good, however the slideshow was still collapsed due to the positioning. Assigning height values wasn't working correctly, so was at a bit of a loss.
Thankfully, I came across a neat little trick of setting the 'padding-top' of the slideshow viewport to a percentage value, dynamically calculated (desired slideshow height, set in the settings panel for this script, divided by desired width). As padding-top percentages are relative to the width of the element, this did a great job of providing responsive height and correcting the viewport again (no longer looking collapsed).
Here is some info on using padding-top for responsive elements that maintain aspect ratio. Great little trick: http://f6design.com/projects/responsive-aspect-ratio/
All is good now, and things are working well in iOS and webkit browsers. Everything is extremely quick and working as it should. Four days later, and it is finally figured out. Not happy about having to resort to JS for resizing, but I guess it was always going to happen due to percentage inconsistencies between browsers. Lots of decimals = no good!
Thanks to all who tried to point me in the right direction. Definitely got me thinking, and learned a lot of debugging skills that I can use again to make sure transitions are performing well. Thanks again!
not sure if this helps or not but I noticed you use 3d translation - I would think a simple 2d translation would be enough especially since your third parameter is 0 and might accelerate the issue, also go with fewer images as Armel L. suggested, don't have an iphone to test though... alternatively, this is a solution I used before css3 but should still work move the element containing the images using javascript by modifying left (?and top - the demo only moves left and right though? without the transition effects) and this way you can fine-tune the refresh rate which I think might account for the slowdown... you can go as low as 18 fps without anyone noticing, might even be good enough with just 16fps
I had this when I was first designing a magazine carousel-style page device.
If you have a series of images within a long "tray", even if they are not within the viewport, they will still take up ram, and you can effectively have five or so before leaks and nastiness begin to happen.
What I found works is "hiding" them ... But make sure they take up the physical space necessary.
What I also found worked was that one could make the 'previous' current and 'next' image are visible and move the tray, 'unhiding' them as they reach those three positions.
In my own system, I skipped the 'tray' holding e images and only had them at -100% width, 100% width and the current one a 0.
I never had much luck with the typical long-tray carousel with large scale background images... Especially with css3 acceleration.

IE GIF/PNG Transparency issue with jQuery

Ok, this is pretty weird...
Here's the page in question: http://s289116086.onlinehome.us/lawjournaltv/index.php
The main blue callout background was originally a PNG, but when I applied some jQuery trickery to it (click the numbers in the top right to see what I mean), an ugly white border appeared where the transparency should be. See this screenshot from IE8: http://skitch.com/darkdriving/n62bu/windows-xp-professional
I figured I could sacrifice the quality/flexibility of a PNG and just resaved each of the backgrounds as GIFs and set the matte color to white (for now). Well, I was proven wrong because IE is treating the GIF transparency the same as the original PNGs.
I've read here that the issue with PNGs, Javascript, and IE has something to do with multiple filters can't be applied to one image, but shouldn't GIFs be exempt from this because they lack the Alpha Channel? Is there any way to make this page look similar in IE to Firefox or Webkit browsers?
Thanks in advance!
This is a bug in IE.
No current version of IE supports the opacity CSS proeprty, so jQuery uses the Alpha filter instead. However, filters force the element to be fully opaque, so they don't work orrectly with transparent PNGs.
To use transparent PNGs in semi-transparent elements, the PNGs need to be applied using the AlphaImageLoader filter (even in IE8). For example:
if ($.browser.msie)
$(something).css({
background: 'none',
filter: 'progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src="/Folder/Image.png", sizingMethod="scale"),alpha(opacity=100)'
});
(This code works; I'm using it right now)
I basically solved this by loading a different set of images (using PHP) on each page refresh. It's not as dynamic, but my attempts at using the ugly, proprietary CSS filters or other javascript-based plugins were all fruitless. In my eyes, this is clearly one of the biggest bugs I've come across in my time spent hacking away at IE. In fact, I'm suprised it took this long for me to encounter it.
Word to the wise in this case: try to back transparent imagery on a solid color or suffer the consequences in IE.

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