282396 - freewebs.com - animated divs placed too close to margin, flashing scrollbar

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Lucian Sandor]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Just visit http://www.freewebs.com/skypeansweringmachine/
The page is not larger than the document workspace and the horizontal scrollbar
is not displayed.
There is an annoying script that scrolls horizontally some empty DIVs with fixed
dimensions. When the DIVs are moved beyond x=0, the scrollbar is displayed
(although my guess is that the part that falls below x=0, defined by x<0, is not
displayed). Then the DIV is removed and the scrollbar disappears.
I might be wrong and the part that falls below x=0 should be displayed, but the
side-effect of this is, at a pretty slow speed (30 DIVs updated at each 10 ms,
meaning between 1 and 5 flashes per second), the CPU gets almost maxed out
(that's a P4 Prescott at 2,8 GHz!). And, of course, the visual effect animating
the scrollbar is pretty obnoxious.
Here I am, asking for a slower JS engine.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open an HTML document where a script animates some DIVs, moving them to the
left side of the document view until they get past x<0 (such as visit
http://www.freewebs.com/skypeansweringmachine/ )
Actual Results:  
1. Obnoxous flashes of the horizontal scrolbar of the HTML container.
2. CPU gets maxed out.

Expected Results:  
Stop displaying parts of DIVs situated on x<0 on clientWidth/innerwidth axis.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

The problem is at the other end of the screen: the hardcoded magic number 20 is
too small in | x[i]=w-((n6)?20:10); |, so when a star starts life, it overlaps
the right side of the screen. Change that 20 to 40, and life's good. Assuming
you're not the page author, could you please let him or her know? The odds of
the overworked Tech Evang folks getting to "animated divs placed too close to
edge of screen on freewebs.com site" anytime soon are not great.

Comment 2

[Lucian Sandor]

(In reply to comment #1)
No, it is not my website. Yes, I will let the owner know.
Indeed, the browser is acting according to the standards, I apologize for the
misleading path my eyes were misleadingly misleading me.
Anyway, I feel like there should be a defence against this kind of annoyances so
I will upload a copy of the blamed HTML.

Comment 3

[Lucian Sandor]

Attachment: HTML/JS sample that will overload the CPU

Comment 4

[Brian]

Seems like your page is viewing properly now, at least for me in FF 1.0.4 / IE
on Windows 2000. The only difference is there aren't any stars in the
background, but it appears as if that was only an update to the page, not a
problem with the browser.

Comment 5

[Lucian Sandor]

The web page has been fixed (I wrote to the webmaster), but the attached HTML/JS
example still uses 90% of my P4 - now using Firefox 1.0.4.(In reply to comment #4)

Comment 6

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

URL redirects to somewhere else that doesn't have that same issue.