I’ll try to keep this as non-technical as possible.
You may have noticed some pretty cool tricks we do in different parts of the application. If you haven’t, check out this video:
One of the things that kept bugging me was our animations in Firefox and Safari were lagging behind Internet Explorer. They were just plain choppy. Some time ago I found that the problem was related to the shadows we added to each section on the page. The effect was stunning and we could do it without the traditional HTML gook it required to pull off. The drawback? It wasn’t supported by Internet Explorer. (No surprise there, Internet Explorer… well, never mind that.) Initially, the problem was really bad. So bad, you noticed scrolling choppiness. But with Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4, the problem virtually disappeared.
Unfortunately, it was still too laggy. So we dropped the shadows completely. Does it look as nice as before? No. But it is a much better experience in the end.
About the author
Mike Wille - I'm the head techie here with a passion and hunger for all things digital. I got into programming because I love to create and couldn't cut a straight line in wood shop.