After a wonderful week in San Francisco and Mountain View, the week ended in a disaster when my colleague and friend Adam was told to find another role at Google – Roughly translated: they laid him off without actually laying him off.
Anti-climax
View Transitions Applied: Smoothly animating a border-radius with a View Transition
To smoothly animate things like borders as part of a View Transition, you need to duplicate that animation onto the ::view-transition-group. For best effect, have the View Transition separately capture the background and foreground of the element you’re animating.
Place the Address Bar at the bottom in Chrome on Android
New in Chrome 134 on Android: the ability to place the Address Bar (aka “Omnibox”) at the bottom. To enable it, go to Chrome’s Settings, locate and tap “Address Bar”, and choose “Bottom”.
View Transitions Applied: Dealing with the Snapshot Containing Block
Beware when manipulating the coordinates of the View Transition’s ::view-transition-group(*) pseudo. Depending on where you read those coordinates from, you might end up with layout jumps when writing them back. This post details the pitfalls and how to deal with them, unlocking more performant animations on the ::view-transition-group() pseudo along the way.
Solved by StyleObserver: Element.matchContainer()
Martin Winkler published a package that polyfills Element.matchContainer to get notified in script when a Container Query matches/unmatches. Under the hood, it uses a StyleObserver.
CSS @function + CSS if() = 🤯
Support for Nested Container Queries and the CSS if() function inside CSS Custom Functions make @function very powerful.
CSS Custom Functions are coming … and they are going to be a game changer!
View Transitions Applied: More performant ::view-transition-group(*) animations
If the dimensions of the ::view-transition-group(*) don’t change between the old and new snapshot you can optimize its keyframes so that it animates on the compositor.
View Transitions Snippets: Keeping the page interactive while a View Transition is running
MPA View Transitions Deep Dive
Back in December I joined Kevin J Powell on his channel to talk about Cross-Document View Transitions