Animations are cool, especially on large screens, so Firefox OS on TV features a lot of smooth, subtle animations to enhance user experience. This article provides guidance for creating effective animations that work well on large screens.

Panasonic's Smart TVs, including their new 4K TVs, continue to feature Mozilla's open source Firefox OS, despite Mozilla lowering its development priority on developing the operating system. 6 Panasonic is continuing to develop their fork, calling it My Home Screen while Mozilla has stated that they will continue to support and work with Panasonic 7 8. Mozilla has stopped all commercial development of Firefox OS, including for TVs. Firefox OS is dead The writing was on the wall and in our review of Panasonic DX900 we called Firefox OS a dead end. Not because it is a bad TV platform – on the contrary it is very user-friendly – but because it had almost no support from the developer community. The result is the loss of Firefox TV branding entirely in favor of Panasonic's own ‘My Home Screen 2.0’, which was previously co-developed with Mozilla. The OS features in the company’s mid to.

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Graphics performance basics

Before starting to code, lets think about graphics performance at a basic level. According to App performance validation, a UI change may trigger a reflow (relayout), a repaint, and a composition. If we want graphics performance to be better, we should trigger them as little as possible.

There are various ways to create animations. For example, when moving a box from left (100px) to right (300px), we may use left, margin, padding, border, or transform to do so. According to CSS Triggers, we should just use transform because:

1. left, margin, and padding trigger reflow, repaint, and composition;
2. border triggers repaint and composition;
3. transform only triggers composition.

The following Codepen is available if you want to perform this test yourself: CSS animation with different properties. try turning on the Firefox FPS meter before running each animation (enabled via the layers.acceleration.draw-fps pref in Firefox's about:config.

Layers

This is cool if we only want to use CSS animations or CSS transitions. When implementing animations with JavaScript however, we need to know about Layers.

A layer is a basic memory block for compositing. All layers will be merged by the compositor before sending them to the graphics buffer. If we have a hardware accelerated compositor (e.g. a GPU), the composition may be done there, which makes performance better.

Since there are many posts discussing how to create a layer (see Accelerated Rendering in Chrome and Layers: Cross-Platform Acceleration for example), here we will give a simple general guide for creating a layer. You'll need a setup along the lines of:

• An element to animate, such as <video> or <canvas>.
• transform: translateZ(0.01px) applied to your element, to separate it onto its own layer.
• CSS animations or CSS transitions to perform the actual animation.

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We can enable the nglayout.debug.paint_flashing pref in about:config to get a guide to which HTML element are layers (see Layout paint flashing in Firefox for more details.) The LayerScope also provides a way to determine the layer structure in Firefox.

A layer needs a block of memory. A layer 100x100px in size may use 100 * 100 * 4 (color depth) = 40KB memory size. Therefore, you should use layers carefully with a source-limited device.

CSS-based animations

The most common ways to create animations on the Web are CSS animations or CSS transitions.

CSS transitions are used to transition between two different states. Unfortunately, we cannot pause or resume a transition without JavaScript because CSS transitions are not designed for this situation. However, we can change states to affect transitions as they run. CSS animations are used to loop animations, allowing for pausing and resuming as required. See our CSS-based animation example for a demonstration of the difference.

JavaScript-based animations

For JavaScript based animations, we should use window.requestAnimationFrame (RAF), designed to provide precise timing for animations, in the same fashion as CSS transitions and CSS animations.

Note: Don't use setTimeout for animations if you can avoid it. It is not as precise as RAF, and has a host of other problems.

Depending on browser implementations, RAF may be triggered before or after CSS transitions/CSS animations. A good animation, whether made by CSS transitions or CSS animations or RAF, should run at 60 fps. RAF will start to slow down however if to many animations are run on it concurrently. Please note that RAF stops running if the frame it is acting on is set to be invisible in some way.

Some libraries claim that JavaScript-based animations may have better performance than CSS animations and CSS transitions. This isn't exactly true, although they can get close, depending on browser implementation. In Firefox for example we have off main-thread animations (OMTA.) When we use CSS animations or CSS transitions, the OMTA moves all calculations to the GPU to offer better performance. Without OMTA, we can have better performance with RAF, which still depends on CSS attributes.

Building a 'Menu Group' web component with CSS Transitions

In this section, we briefly describe how a series of CSS transitions is utilised in the Menu Group web component we built for the Homescreen app on Firefox OS TVs. It is located on the upper left of the screen as a gearwheel icon and expands when focused. To see it in action for yourself, check out our Menu Group usage example: to run this successfully you need Firefox Nightly with the dom.webcomponents.enabled pref enabled in about:config.

Why use CSS transitions to animate “Menu Group”? Users should be able to open or close the Menu Group at any time, and CSS transitions can achieve this easily. The transition from close to open can be divided into 3 steps: enlarging, shrinking and opening. First, the icon becomes a little bit bigger and its background color changes. Second, it returns to the original state. Finally, the icon rotates, and the Menu Group expands to show the menu items it contains.

Building this with CSS transitions is straight forward. We defined 5 CSS classes for each state: enlarging, shrinking, and opening are for the opening transition, while closing and closed are for the closing transition. To chain the transitions, the transitionend event handler works as a state machine, which changes the applied CSS class accordingly. Here is the event handler source code:

Disadvantages of using CSS transitions

Although CSS transitions are easy to implement, they are not without problems:

• Performing actions following a CSS transition: No event will be fired after cancelling a transition. When we build a web app with actions following transitions, it’s possible that after transitioning element(s) are removed, these actions won't happen, which sometimes stalls the application. In this case, we usually need a timer to monitor whether a transition is cancelled or not. This happens mostly in web apps with rich animated UI components.
• Making sure CSS transitions are triggered: CSS transitions sometimes will not be triggered with a change of CSS class alone. For newly appended elements, as well-know workaround is to manually trigger a reflow and the transition for the elements using getComputedStyle() or setTimeout().
• Pausing or changing the CSS transition playback rate: Although changing pause and playback rates are possible with CSS transitions, it is not easy to make it 100% precise if the transition-timing-function is not linear.

Issues like these make chaining a series of transitions together more complicated. In addition, we need to pay more attention to handling unexpected user interactions. Even with a proper animation library it's still difficult to match the flexibility of JavaScript-based animations.

Getting started with Web Animations

Fake auto insurance card generator. The emerging Web Animations spec provides a great way to control CSS Transitions and Animations. To demonstrate usage of Web Animations in Firefox, we rewrote a part of the animation code in the last example — see Menu Group using Web Animations API. Please use Firefox Nightly 42 or later to run this example code.

The major difference in this version of Menu Group is that instead of handling the transitionend event to chain or cancel CSS transition state changes, here we use the ES2015 Promise object returned from the Web Animations API. Take the animateEnlarge() method for example. When called, the function first sets the CSS class for the enlarging animation, and then gets the CSSTransition object we want to handle.

The getAnimations() method returns an array of the CSSTransitions/CSSAnimations currently applied to the element. The finished property is a Promise object that is either resolved when the CSSTransition is finished or rejected when the CSSTransition is cancelled. Since CSSTransition and CSSAnimation objects are now much easier to provide with corresponding actions, we can better control both when one of them gets cancelled.

Chaining a series of CSSTransitions now becomes much easier to structure and to read as well. When focus/open is called, we first cancel all the CSSTransitions/CSSAnimations on this Menu Group element and then perform transitions that are chained using ES2015 Promise.

Note: The Web Animations API is currently being implemented in Firefox. See Are we animated yet for the latest list of supported API objects.

Introduction

The approach to designing Firefox OS for Television is fundamentally different from phones or tablets. It requires rethinking of how experiences are structured and how to fulfill the needs of a wide range of uses. Firefox OS for Television was designed not only to simplify the UI, but also to optimize interaction, and to help users get the content they want immediately. Below is the detailed information about the concept of our visual and motion designs.

User Interface Design

Responsive

The controls are designed in code (SVG) and will scale to any screen size without the need for new bitmap graphics. The UI is responsive, it works across devices of all shapes and sizes, from small screen watches to giant screen TVs. The UI components are created in SVG by using simple flat circles. We minimized the use of gradients and reduced shadows as much as possible, but made sure that the controls can be identified distinctly.

Style

Why a circle? We chose to use the circular shape of our Firefox logo as a source of inspiration. Circles have free movement (they naturally roll), shading and lines can enhance this sense of movement within the circle. Circles are warm, humane, comforting and natural. Their movement suggest energy and power. Their completeness suggests infinity, unity, and harmony. You’ll see the circle used throughout the designs of the components, especially in the animations.

Customizable

By changing a color, shape or style of an animation, the controls can be customized to suit any brand need. All controls are all well designed and created as CSS components allowing for effortless customization.

Design in Animations

Groundwork

A great way to make your animations move in a more lifelike manner is to vary the rate at which the object moves. Animation should imitate the world that we live in. So, it’s important to ensure that the pace of movements within your animations, making sure they reflect the real world.

Motion easing will create a more natural look when applied to positions, rotations, deformations, or scale. This will add acceleration and deceleration to the motion, and can make the experience much more playful and delightful.

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Motion should be responsive and intuitive. It should react in a way that reassures the user, rather than surprises or confuses them. The reaction of the UI, to a users actions, should be corresponding and comprehensible.

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Personality

The most obvious principle is that any motion or animation should be of the highest standard possible. We animated and applied liquid motion to the main launchers (TV, Apps, Devices, and Dashboard) resulting in motion as the user selects each one of them. To users, this bespoke motion is truly delightful allowing for further engagement.

Orientation

Motion should help ease the user through the experience. It should establish the “physical space” of the UI by the way objects appear on and off the screen, or establish the user’s focus. It should aid the flow of actions, giving clear guidance through the navigation model. Here in our TV home design, we used scaled motion to guide the users through which objects are selected, and keep the user orientated within the interaction path.

Less is more

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Subtlety is key when designing the motion to UI. Motion should be used to help the user stay focused, therefore restraint is needed as the design is used as an accent to the interaction design and should not dominate the experience.

For more information and guides about Firefox OS TV, please refer to the session TVs and connected devices and find other links for relevant articles below.

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I hope you enjoyed this post about how we designed Firefox OS TV. Parallels access agent download. If you have any feedback or ideas to help Firefox OS Design Team improve ourselves, please leave a comment.

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─ By Scott Wu, Firefox OS UX designer