Intent to Implement: Animation Worklet

[Majid Valipour]

Contact emails

maj...@chromium.org, fla...@chromium.org

Spec

https://wicg.github.io/animation-worklet/

Summary

The Animation Worklet API provides a method to create scripted animations that control a set of animation effects. The API is designed to make it possible for user agents to run such animations in their own dedicated thread to provide a degree of performance isolation from main thread. We expect this new primitive to be used for creating high performance scroll-linked and procedural animations on the web.

Motivation

The explainer has all the details on the rationale and motivation but in short the feature makes it possible for many common rich scripted effects that currently run on main thread (using requestAnimationFrame and/or scroll event) to be moved off thread to improve smoothness without losing richness.

Interoperability and Compatibility Risk

The feature is being developed as part of Houdini Task Force. Its API design has been guided by the task force feedback and with particular goal of being compatible with existing web-animations API. The current design iteration has received positive signal with some open issues. A primary goal of our implementation effort is to help better inform the task force and standardization process.

Ongoing technical constraints

None. Our current design document may be found here. Note that Animation Worklet is an evolution of the CompositorWorker idea and replaces it.

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?

Yes.

OWP launch tracking bug

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=467782

Link to entry on the feature dashboard

https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5762982487261184

Requesting approval to ship?

No