By Ross Allen

Working on one of the Chromebooks Google lets you borrow on Virgin America flights, I noticed scrolling down the page on my airbnb.com dashboard was much slower than on my normal laptop. I chalked it up to weak Chromebook hardware, but other sites were scrolling just fine. box-shadow had caused slow scrolling on our search results page before, so I did some investigation.

I used Chrome’s Timeline tab to see the duration of paint events on the page. Before each test I forced a garbage collection and scrolled to the same window position using window.scroll(0, 140). Then I clicked the down arrow in the scroll bar twice, a 40px-scroll per click, and recorded the paint times.

10px box-shadow blur-radius (original stylesheet value) = 3 paint events per 40px scroll

To see if box-shadow was slowing down scrolling, I cut the blur-radius in half. The scrolling was far smoother, and the numbers showed why: paint events were taking half as long, which meant more paint events per time period.

5px box-shadow blur-radius = 3–4 paints per 40px scroll

Since box-shadow was the obvious offender, I tried taking it out entirely.

0px box-shadow blur radius = 2 extra paint events in the same amount of time, much smoother scrolling

And then I set it to something huge. The Chromebook did not like painting a 300px blur-radius. It took 2 full seconds of paint time per scroll arrow click!

300px box-shadow blur radius= SO SLOW!

Final Product Changes

We dropped the blur-radius for the boxes on airbnb.com/dashboard to 3px and added a 3px offset to get a cleaner look that didn’t tear up performance for devices with less processing power.

After (3px blur-radius, 3px offset)

box-shadow: 0 3px 3px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15);

Before (10px blur)

box-shadow: 0 0 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15);

Why is this important? I have like 3 Chromebook visitors.

Your Chromebook audience is probably pretty small, but Chrome is built on WebKit just like the iOS and Android browsers. If CSS is hurting performance on a Chromebook it’s likely hurting it for mobile WebKit users visiting your full site too.

In case you try this at home, this is the Chromebook I was using: Google Chrome 14.0.835.204, Platform 811.154

Read it in Portuguese: http://blog.rafaelcavalcante.com/front-end/cuidado-o-box-shadow-pode-prejudicar-a-rolagem-da-sua-pagina/