Product
Start page: smooth scrolling on computers without a graphics card
The new start page was slow on computers without a graphics card. A scroll pass that took 51 seconds now takes 9. The look is the same.
Since 25 October the start page shows a camera flight through crystal rooms. On computers without a graphics card it scrolled in steps of a few frames per second, and Firefox was no better. We measured it and fixed the cause.
The cause was one slow light that never stops: a large layer behind the scene drifted slowly all the time. With a graphics card that costs nothing. Without one, it made the computer redraw the whole scene on every scroll step. Now that light stands still when the browser has no graphics card, or when the frame rate collapses while you scroll. Everything else stays: same frames, same camera, same colours.
Three more changes cut the load for everyone. Blur, edge fade and colour saturation of the background layers are now part of the images instead of being computed on every frame, and the widest layers are drawn at image size and scaled up. The images changed only in their file names, and the page address and text did not change.
Comparison screenshots from Chrome with a graphics card, Chrome without one, and Firefox show the same page before and after. Loading time (largest paint) stays under one second on the test machine.