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Comment by Rohansi

1 day ago

Yes, visual effects and animations in UIs burn cycles just to make it look nicer. Doesn't matter if it's a website or the native system UI.

To be clear, I'm not saying it's fine to constantly render when you know nothing changed. I'm saying the load from this should be very small. Most of the performance issues from this page are actually from the header animation, which you can delete in the inspector to see a significant drop in usage (mine went from ~35 to ~6.6 CPU).

3 comments

Rohansi

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bmitc  3 hours ago

What happens when you have 50 tabs open using this "engine"?

  • Rohansi  2 hours ago

    Nothing? I actually measured it incorrectly in the comment you replied. With nothing happening on the page Chrome's task manager reports ~0.1 CPU usage for the tab. Almost all of the overhead on this page is from the header and footer animations [1] and not the widgets. Browsers limit things like `requestAnimationFrame` in inactive tabs anyway so even if it was bad it wouldn't be devastating.

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986612