Skip to main
Article
Diagram of layered squares showing movement with arrows

Birds Recommend: Performant Parallaxing with CSS 3D

If you’d like to learn how to create parallax scrolling for your website, Paul Lewis’ guide to performant parallaxing is the perfect place to start.

Thanks to Rachel Nabors for pointing us to Paul Lewis’ excellent article on Performant Parallaxing. This article is so useful, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to recommend it. Continue reading for a quick summary or head over to Paul’s article right away!

Performant Parallaxing >

Paul, a developer at Google, starts with the don’ts. Don’t use scroll events to create a parallax effect.

JavaScript doesn’t guarantee that parallaxing will keep in step with the page’s scroll position.

Paul Lewis

Trying to achieve a parallax look by changing background position doesn’t work well either, negatively effecting the animation.

Paul recommends using CSS 3D for performant parallaxing, and gives detailed instructions for how to do just that. Anticipating the bugs for us, Paul includes various workarounds.

Have you used this approach? Did it work? Let us know by sending us a message via Twitter.

Performant Parallaxing >

Recent Articles

  1. OddContrast displays sRGB gamut range in P3 color format and an estimate of foreground alpha value ratio.
    Article post type

    New Features for OddContrast

    Display color gamut ranges and more

    OddContrast, OddBird’s color format converter and contrast checker, gets new features – including the ability to swap background and foreground colors, and display color gamut ranges on the color sliders. Contrast ratios now incorporate foreground color alpha values.

    see all Article posts
  2. W3C logo
    Article post type

    Custom CSS Functions in the Browser

    Start using author-defined functions

    There’s been a lot of progress in the CSS Working Group lately, but I want to draw your attention to a prototype that landed in Chromium ‘Canary’ (v136+) browsers with the experimental platform features flag enabled. Author-defined Functions are coming to CSS, and you can start to experiment with them…

    see all Article posts
  3. A chain-link gate in black and white with a sign that says closed indefinitely, and a smaller warning with gruesome icons for entrapment (a person being smashed) and pinching (a hand going through gears)
    Article post type

    How do we move logical shorthands forward?

    There are several proposals, but one major road block

    We’re trying to make progress on shorthand syntax for CSS logical properties. But the path forward depends on where we hope to be a decade from now.

    see all Article posts