Safari pauses all animation on redirect / form submission

Question

I have an animation that triggers when a link is clicked. It is a jQuery animation that enlarges a div then fades out. To ensure speed, at the exact same time that the link is c

Answer 1

What I have found is that Safari actually pauses all animations as soon as the pagehide event is fired, whenever the browser begins loading a new page.

After pagehide, it won't even allow CSS changes such as showing a spinner that was previously hidden.

In order to show the spinner before the pagehide event fires, I needed to add listeners for a[href] clicks and ajaxComplete events.

My guess is that Safari does this to enhance performamce by focusing all available CPU and GPU power to the rendering of the next page.

I think this is a bit extreme, and unfortunate for UX where in many mobile web applications we use spinner animations at page unload to show the user something is happening during the few seconds while a new page is being fetched.

I have so far not found a way to preserve motion animation during page unload; at best the spinner appears frozen but still shows up... a possible workaround is to use a static message to indicate it's "Loading..."