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How to avoid the ugly flickering effect when using CSS transitions in iOS

Posted: | Author: | Filed under: CSS, HTML, iOS | 2 Comments »

Recently I used CSS transitions to animate some images inside an UIWebView. Everything worked fine and the transitions where really smooth. I used the translate transition to move the images that where inside a div HTML element:

To move the images I created a CSS class that contained the transition:

.move {
   -webkit-transform: translate(50px,100px); 
}

Then I would add the CSS Class to the

to move the div and the images contained in it.

document.getElementById('image-container').className = "move";

This worked as expected. However, when the images moved, there was an ugly flicker. It turned out that this is caused by a CSS property call “backface-visibility”. Normally this is used, when you do 3D CSS transitions (e.g. 3D rotations). “backface-visibility” determines whether the backside of a HTML element is visible, when it is not facing the screen. As I am not doing any 3D transitions it should not matter how this property is set. Wrong. Obviously in Webkit Browsers it does matter. To fix the ugly flickering you have to add the following to the CSS class:

.move {
   -webkit-transform: translate(50px,100px); 
   -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
}

And thats not enough. The flickering became less but it was still there. Only after I also set the “backface-visibility” property on the images themselves, the flickering went away completely:

.move {
   -webkit-transform: translate(50px,100px); 
   -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
}

.move img {
   -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
}

I don’t know if this is a bug in Webkit or if there is a logical explanation for this behavior, but setting “backface-visiblity” to “hidden” on all animated elements did the trick.

2 Comments

  • 1

    sergiosaid at

    thanks for the article, i came here googling around and the “-webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;” was a wonderful solution for me.

    thanks!

  • 2

    Jörnsaid at

    Thanks for the comment, I’m glad that it helped you!

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