Performant web animations — Emily Hayman
summary
Aim for 60fps (16.7ms per frame) by only animating properties that hit the compositor: transform and opacity. Use will-change to promote heavy or fixed elements to their own layer, apply requestAnimationFrame for imperative timing, and prefer CSS animations when possible for browser optimizations. Watch for layout thrash (read then write), use CSS containment for isolated widgets, and fall back to pragmatic hacks — e.g., replace thousands of SVG nodes with an image on touch devices when event listeners kill performance.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction to performance
- 0:48Why performance matters
- 2:39Browser rendering internals
- 5:54Optimizing CSS properties
- 8:23Manual layer promotion
- 10:32The 'will-change' property
- 13:05Imperative vs declarative
- 16:01Avoiding layout thrashing
- 16:52CSS containment
- 18:12Hack-based optimizations
- 19:35Performance testing tools








