Webkit animation is leaving junk pixels behind on the screen

Question

The following code puts a white box on the screen. If you run this on an iPad (you can adjust the pixels to run it on an iPhone, too), when you touch the box, it will scoot

Answer 1

The solution

box-shadow: 0 0 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.05);

You can use the background colour of your box as the box-shadow colour if you feel this is too noticeable.

Alternatively, according to this answer on a similar issue in Chrome (thanks to Sebastian in the comments for the tip-off), you may want to try:

outline: 1px solid transparent;

What's going on?

I've given a fairly lengthy explanation elsewhere, but here's the short version. For performance reasons, WebKit only repaints those part of a page that it thinks might have changed. However, the iOS (pre-7) Safari implementation of border radius anti-aliases a few pixels beyond the calculated dimensions of a box. Since WebKit doesn't know about these pixels, they don't get redrawn; instead, they are left behind and build up on each animation frame.

The usual solution—as I suggested in my other answer—is to force that element to require hardware acceleration so that it gets painted as a separate layer. However, too many small elements or a few large ones will result in a lot of tiles getting pushed to the GPU, with obvious performance implications.

Using box-shadow solves the problem more directly: it extends the repaint dimensions of the box, forcing WebKit to repaint the extra pixels. The known performance implications of box-shadow in mobile browsers are directly related to the blur radius used, so a one pixel shadow should have little-to-no effect.