iPhone WebKit CSS animations cause flicker

Question

This is the iphone site: http://www.thevisionairegroup.com/projects/accessorizer/site/

After you click "play now" you'll get to a game. The guns will scroll in. You can scroll the purse and accessories up and down. You can see that when you let go they snap into place. Just as that snap happens, there's a flicker that occurs. The only webkit animations I'm using are:

'-webkit-transition': 'none'

'-webkit-transition': 'all 0.2s ease-out'

'-webkit-transform': 'translate(XXpx, XXpx)'

I choose either the first or second transition based on whether or not I want it to animate, and the transform is the only way I move things around.

The biggest issue though is when you click "Match items", then click "Play again". You'll see as the guns animate in, the entire background of the accessories/purses goes white. Can someone please radiate me with some insight asto why this is happening??

Ourselves

Answer 1

I added -webkit-backface-visiblity and that mostly helped, but I still had an initial flicker after reloading the page. When I added -webkit-perspective: 1000, there was no flicker whatsoever.

-webkit-perspective: 1000;
-webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;

Suffrage

What's the magic behind 1000? Do any other value (>0) may work? – Zaxis

NOTE: this makes the animation unresponsive to mouse events on windows chrome v19: in practice adding this, there is no flicker, but the animation not always starts (on mouse hover or whatever) – Lamanna

Fixed my problem: simple animating div was popping 1px to the left on animation start in Chrome 25 but was fine in Safari 6.0.2 and Canary 27. Glad it works, wish I understood why. – Doane

NOTE: adding backface-visibility will change your colors rendering. Here is an example with backface visibility on and off: bit.ly/13ldbvY – Freedman

I had this problem with text flickering when trying to transition link elements. Changing the backface-visibility altered the anti-aliasing, making the font really thin. Fixed by using -webkit-font-smoothing: subpixel-antialiased; – Neel

Don't understand why this answer wasn't accepted. This solution really fixed very annoying flicker bug in Google Chrome because of the CSS3 transition effect I was using. Thanks a ton for sharing this. – Plectrum

i just added this to every element on the page and nothing worked. I'm using transit.js for animations btw, could that be it? – Miry

Nice one! Worked perfectly :) – Container

I am trying but it is not working for me. Here is a code snippet: codeply.com/go/g7Zp98paz5 – Drooff

@Zaxis I guess we'll never know – Iene

It looks like perspective: none; is working as well – Steatite

this code to add animation dom? or add to it's parent dom? – Gigue

Answer 2

Try this, and hopefully it will help:

#game {
  -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
}

Crystlecs

This works great in Safari default but fails in standalone mode. Do you have any ideas? – Zaxis

Answer 3

body {-webkit-transform:translate3d(0,0,0);}

Zenithal

This did it for me.. however I had to apply it on a #wrapper element since applying on the body would screw up the layout. – Trifle

If anyone want to see the backface "-webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;" didn't works, but this one is perfect. Thanks! – Catalinacatalo

perfect. -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; caused any scale transformations to be blurry. body {-webkit-transform:translate3d(0,0,0);} worked a treat. – Idealist

I am trying but it is not working for me. Here is a code snippet: codeply.com/go/g7Zp98paz5 – Drooff

This worked for me. In my case, scale(1) caused the flicker. thanks a lot – Illfounded

Answer 4

The actual answer for my case is here. Someone was close with: -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; But the real answer is -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; needs to be added to the parent div.

Marjana

I actually needed to add -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; to the parent div, the animated div, AND the children of the animated div. Once I did that, it worked flawlessly. – Scarcity

I think that fixed my flicker too by adding it to the parent. What does it actually do? – Sideburns

Adding it to the parent undoes the "fixed" position on the child elements though :( – Galle

Answer 5

I had a problem with a "flickering" CSS transition as well. The animation in question was a menu sliding in from off screen, and just when the animation finished, the entire menu flashed/flickered.

As it turned out, this was caused by an actual iOS feature, the "tap highlight", which for some reason kicked in after the CSS animation finished (i.e. way after the actual tap), and highlighted the entire menu instead of only the element that was tapped. I "fixed" the issue by entirely disabling tap-highlight, as described here:

-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0,0,0,0);

Electrostriction

Answer 6

Michael's answer -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; worked when we hit this problem. We had translateZ(0px) on our <body> tag to prevent an iOS 3.1.3 and earlier IFRAME boundary bug and it caused anims to flicker. Adding -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; to each element we animated fixed the flicker! Life saver.

Crossgarnet

Answer 7

div { -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); }

i noticed when i had a hover state on a div the page would flicker, even if i did not have any css or js attached to it. maybe this helps someone else.

Catherincatherina

for me that one did the trick. the others were only relevant when transitions were in place. – Heuristic

Answer 8

If anyone finds that backface-visibility is not working, you might look at the properties already on your animated element. For us, we found that overflow-y: scroll on an absolute or fixed positioned element was causing major flickering on iOS.

Simply removing overflow-y: scroll fixed it.

Anacreon

Removing overflow-y: scroll helped my case. Thank you so much! – Sexed

It's probably my case also. but I can't remove the overflow-y nore the absolute positon for this element. any idea? – Brookbrooke

Answer 9

Even though I had -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d; and -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden the flicker was still happening.

In my case the cause was the z-index. Increasing it on active element did help.

Arturoartus

Answer 10

I tried all the above and still had major flickering problems on Firefox and Chrome. I fixed it, or at least greatly reduced it to an acceptable issue by removing the box-shadow transform that was causing many repaints during the animation. I followed this and modified for my needs:

http://tobiasahlin.com/blog/how-to-animate-box-shadow/

Saltine

Answer 11

I had to use an actual value (rather than 0):

.no-flick{
    -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
    backface-visibility: hidden;
    -webkit-transform:translateZ(0.1px);
    transform: translateZ(0.1px); /* needs an actual value */
}

Example:

<div class="foo no-flick"></div>

From what I've read, the flicker is caused by the browser switching between hardware and software rendering. And I think browser manufacturers are aware of yea olde "translate3d(0,0,0)" to force hardware rendering -- so they may now be ignoring these fake values.

=> Using an actual value may cause things to "stick".

Anyway, worked for me.

Soapsuds

Answer 12

So I found a fix for this issue where none others worked properly.

CSS:

.ios-animation-fixer {
  position: fixed;
  width: 100%;
  height: 10px;
  top: -10px;
  background-color: green;
  z-index: 1;
  pointer-events: none;
  visibility: hidden;
}

HTML:

<div class="ios-animation-fixer"></div>

Then set the z-index for your animated element to be > 1. This somehow tricks iOS devices into rendering the animation differently, and avoids the flicker in my scenario. Adjusting z-index values may be helpful if this solution doesn't work out of the gate.

Coit

Answer 13

I've been trying to fix a similar problem for ages, and a comment in this thread was the key for me, so I'm highlighting it for others:

I actually needed to add -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; to the parent div, the animated div, AND the children of the animated div. Once I did that, it worked flawlessly. – mattstuehler Mar 12, 2013 at 13:36

I has a horrible white flash when using transform: translate3d to reposition a div: if I added transition-duration to the transform and moved the div too far, the screen would flash white on iOS webkit browsers (only!). It drove me crazy, and I combed threads like these looking for a solution, while trying everything else I could to stop it. Here's what finally worked:

#board_container * { /* asterisk(*) => board container and all its descendants */
    /* 
       attempt to stop iOS webkit flash when board is panned 
       to its edge... is it finally working?!?
    */
    backface-visibility: hidden;
    -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
    transform-style: preserve-3d;
    -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
}

I had previously tried applying things to my #board div and its wrapper #board_container, but there were a couple more levels of elements contained within, and apparently they all needed the treatment for the white flash to disappear. What I has missing was a simple asterisk in the CSS:

#board_container * {

Never did figure out why it only happened on iOS webkit browsers, and only when the board div was translated beyond a certain extent...

Emend

Answer 14

Here's a new solution. I was setting the background-image with jQuery, and none of the 3d-rendering tricks worked. So I tried using classes to define the properties instead. Voilà! Smooth as butter.

This causes flicker:

$('#banner').css('backgroundImage', 'url("slide_1.jpg")';

Instead do:

$('#banner').attr('class', '.slide-1');

with classes defined:

#banner { -webkit-transition: background-image .25s; }
.slide-1 { background-image: url("slide_1.jpg"); }
.slide-2 { background-image: url("slide_2.jpg"); }

Toole

Answer 15

Try this solution. It works for me in Phonegap + jQM 1.4.0:

Change this <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

To this instead:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, user-scalable=no" />

Read more here: http://www.fishycode.com/post/40863390300/fixing-jquery-mobiles-none-transition-flicker-in

Cling

Answer 16

I had spent a lot of time trying to figure out this issue for Ember Animated Outlets, Phonegap, and iOS setup.

Though simple, I had to add a background to each top-level parent element that was included in the css animations. In other words, make sure that at no point in your views there is an element that doesn't have a background.

My setup was this for each template and all three elements had a background color assigned to them:

<header></header> <body class="content"></body> <footer></footer>

Biology

Answer 17

Instead of applying the transition to "all" just specify the one you really need. It removed the flickering on my case.

Treva

Answer 18

for me, flickering issue on safari solved by removing will-change: transform; to the animated element.

also I could solve this issue by adding overflow: hidden; to the parent, but with this, all elements with transform: translateZ() got ineffective

Cirilla

Answer 19

I've experienced flickering when performing a slide transition when using a default Android web browser.

I've used the following transition css:

-webkit-transition: all 2s;
-webkit-transform: translate(100%,0);

None of the workarounds mentioned in this thread have helped to solve the issue. Finally I've found the solution. The source of flickering is the all keyword which means to perform all possible transitions. I've changed it to perform only transformation and the issue has been solved:

-webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 2s;
-webkit-transform: translate(100%,0);

Roulade

Answer 20

What fixed it for me was to delay the assignment of the transform-translate CSS rule. Something like this:

HTML:

<div class="animate-this loading"></div>

CSS:

.animate-this {
  &:not(.loading) {
    transform: -webkit-translate(50px);
    transform: translate(50px);
    transition: -webkit-transform 0.3s, transform 0.3s;
  }
}

JavaScript (jQuery):

$(document).ready(function(){
  window.setTimeout(function(){
    $('.animate-this').removeClass('loading');
  }, 250);
});

---

… Because -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; didn't do anything for me.

Crossopterygian

Answer 21

UPDATE 2019

You can turn on flickering by simply add these rules to your element that is transition used on.

-webkit-transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0);

Worked for me on Safarai

Matchmark