Intent to Implement: CompositorWorker

[Ian Vollick]

Contact emails

vol...@chromium.org

Spec

Design Sketch: http://goo.gl/ePFWxI Spec placeholder (will be home of future spec): http://dev.w3.org/houdini/css-async-style/

Summary

Allows workers to respond to input and update visuals.

Motivation

• Custom, threaded, scroll-linked effects (parallax, pull-to-refresh, snap-points, etc).
• Fast components. I.e., protected from a janky content thread
• Implies incremental adoption by existing sites that may have a janky content thread.
• Permits a programming model where
• Content is produced asynchronously, and
• Presentation is updated synchronously by a worker thread.

Compatibility Risk

None yet as I am not requesting permission to ship, and don't intend to any time soon. This is meant to allow prototyping for experimentation and to inform discussions. That said, if this were shipped, I believe that it still poses little compatibility risk. The (sketched and tentative) API surface is small, and I have tried hard not to expose browser internals that we may not want to be attached to. For example, should we decide to run CompositorWorker script on the main thread, the UA should be free to do so.

Ongoing technical constraints

None

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://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=467782

Link to entry on the feature dashboard

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

Requesting approval to ship?

No

[Rick Byers]

Woot!  I think this is an essential component of our effort to bring native-mobile style scroll-coupled effects to the interoperable web.  I wholeheartedly support implementing this behind a flag and collecting feedback from developers.

[Philip Jägenstedt]

Hi Ian, this sounds very exciting! Has there been any major change in thinking since you presented it (as UI Worker) at BlinkOn3? I also left a comment in the document too.

Philip

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[Ian Vollick]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:59 PM Philip Jägenstedt <phi...@opera.com> wrote:

Hi Ian, this sounds very exciting! Has there been any major change in thinking since you presented it (as UI Worker) at BlinkOn3? I also left a comment in the document too.

Thanks! Nope, no major change. There have been some simplifications to the API (which is still in flux), but the concept is about the same.

(And thank you for commenting on the doc!)

[to...@tobireif.com]

This effort seems very promising! As a web dev may I say Thanks!

I hope that one major focus will be to allow web apps to become faster & smoother (and fully 60fps) where there are long-running requestAnimationFrame animations happening at the same time as user interactions, eg https://github.com/tobireif/boomchat .