Parallax scroll choppy performance on Safari & Firefox

Question

I'm building a onepager with a parallax intro. For the parallax effect I'm using the following piece of JS:

// Parallax
var layerBg = document.querySelector('.js-layer-bg');
var layerText = document.querySelector('.js-layer-text');
var sectionIntro = document.getElementById('section-intro');
var scrollPos = window.pageYOffset;
var layers = document.querySelectorAll('[data-type=\'parallax\']');

var parallax = function() {
  for (var i = 0, len = layers.length; i < len; i++) {
    var layer = layers[i];
    var depth = layer.getAttribute('data-depth');
    var movement = (scrollPos * depth) * -1;
    var translate3d = 'translate3d(0, ' + movement + 'px, 0)';

    layer.style['-webkit-transform'] = translate3d;
    layer.style.transform = translate3d;
  }
};

window.requestAnimationFrame(parallax);

window.addEventListener('scroll', function() {

  // Parallax layers
  scrollPos = window.pageYOffset;
  window.requestAnimationFrame(parallax);

  // Animate text layers
  var vhScrolled = Math.round(window.pageYOffset / window.innerHeight * 100);
  if (vhScrolled > 100 && layerText.classList.contains('is-hidden')) {
    layerText.classList.remove('is-hidden');
  } else if (vhScrolled <= 100 && !layerText.classList.contains('is-hidden')) {
    layerText.classList.add('is-hidden');
  }
});

Apart from this I'm animating a few other things on scroll using 2 libraries: ScrollMonitor and ScrollReveal. Nothing too special.

I've been developing this on Chrome and everything seems to be working smoothly enough. However, when I tested on Safari and especially Firefox, things got so laggy to the point of actually crashing my browser.

I really can't figure out what I am doing wrong and why performance is so different between browsers.

Hopefully you can help me out, thanks!

partial transparency is the most common cause of bad scrolling perf. — dandavis, Nov 30 '16 at 21:40
You can check this if it helps: https://stackoverflow.com/a/66291111/15233354 — StanP, Feb 20 '21 at 11:46

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 30 '16 at 21:28

I'm not altogether certain about what's specifically causing the lag/choppiness issues, I seem to remember something similar in past projects. I'd look into any further image optimization to lower the weight of what's being rendered, that can make a huge difference. Otherwise, I've made a few suggestions for efficiency tweaks that might help it run a bit faster:

// Parallax
var layerBg = document.querySelector('.js-layer-bg');
var layerText = document.querySelector('.js-layer-text');
var sectionIntro = document.getElementById('section-intro');
var layers = document.querySelectorAll('[data-type=\'parallax\']');
var len = layers.length; // cache length
var layerarray = []; //create cache for depth attributes

var i = -1;
while(++i < len){
  layerarray.push([layers[i], parseInt(layers[i].getAttribute('data-depth'))]); //create an array that stores each element alongside its depth attribute instead of requesting that attribute every time
}

var parallax = function() {
  var scrollPos = window.pageYOffset; //define inside function instead of globally
  var i = -1;

  while(++i < len) { //while loop with cached length for minor speed gains
    var layer = layerarray[i][0];
    var depth = layerarray[i][1];
    var movement = (scrollPos * depth) * -1;
    var translate3d = ['translate3d(0, ', movement, 'px, 0)'].join(""); //join statement is much faster than string concatenation

    layer.style['-webkit-transform'] = translate3d;
    layer.style.transform = translate3d;
  }


  // Animate text layers
  var vhScrolled = Math.round(scrollPos / window.innerHeight * 100);
  if (vhScrolled > 100 && layerText.classList.contains('is-hidden')) {
    layerText.classList.remove('is-hidden');
  } else if (vhScrolled <= 100 && !layerText.classList.contains('is-hidden')) {
    layerText.classList.add('is-hidden');
  }
};

window.requestAnimationFrame(parallax);

window.addEventListener('scroll', function() {

  // Parallax layers
  window.requestAnimationFrame(parallax);

  //moved text animation into the animationframe request
});

Welcome. Not sure if it'll make any noticeable difference, but worth a shot. Definitely look into the image compression though, that is the #1 culprit for parallax slowness — jmcgriz, Nov 30 '16 at 22:35

Parallax scroll choppy performance on Safari & Firefox

1 Answers1