Cloud animations on Kagi start page use excessive CPU resources

slartoff

Steps to reproduce:
The cloud animations on the kagi.com main page, at least on Safari on macOS, use huge amounts of CPU, draining my laptop battery. This is an issue particularly if I have kagi.com open in a browser, then switch focus to another app: I see over 40% CPU use on an M1 Max macBook Pro.

Expected behavior:
The kagi.com main page should not burn CPU.

System info:
Safari 15.3 / macOS 12.2.1 / US-EAST

Image/Video:

Vlad

slartoff You are right. We will look into either optimizing this or completely removing animation.

If we could optimize it would you prefer to keep the animations?

Vlad

slartoff We updated the animation can you check now?

gesumin

#HaltTheClouds 😆

RGBCube

Vlad I personally love the cloud and star animations, if it can be optimized i'd say to keep it

slartoff

I'm not anti-cloud animation in principle. My only objection is the high CPU use 😆

z64

I'm unable to reproduce this on Chrome/Firefox/Qutebrowser on linux, it barely registers on my PC. Is this issue isolated to Safari? Is it isolated to M1?

Vlad

z64 CPU usage shoots up in WebKit browsers on a Mac. Could be a WebKit related issue. Hopefully the anim can be optimized.

slartoff

Vlad Thanks for looking into this!

On my M1 Mac, I still see high CPU use (about 30% as reported by task manager.app) when the kagi.com main page is open. This occurs in both Safari and also Chrome 99.0 (both webkit-based). I checked with Firefox 98.0.2 also, and there, kagi.com uses even more CPU (50-60% as reported by task manager.app).

Vlad

slartoff This seems to be only WebKit issue as it does not happen in Chrome or Firefox. Still On my old Mac it spikes at 10% so not sure why would it go up to 30% on your M1.

GrinningFool

I am encountering this on Firefox [98.0.2 (64-bit)] on Linux. Sitting idle with all extensions disabled and the Kagi search page open, CPU usage is ₅₀% of one core. It is only an issue when the Kagi tab is visible - if it is not the active tab, it does not use CPU.

Vlad

Kagi will now respect your OS "Reduced motion" setting. If this is on, clouds will be not animated on home page.

gesumin

Vlad

Very cool, I didn't know websites could read the "reduced motion" setting of the OS. The clouds don't move anymore, it's just sad that the stars stopped popping in and out as well xD

blokey

Hello,

This is causing excessive CPU usage on my Mac as well, however I don't want to use a hammer across the whole of my OS to disable animations.

Can I just disable this on your site please?

urrlich

blokey
Same here. Is it so hard to make a setting for this? I just signed up for a trial account and the first thing I saw was Firefox using almost 100% of one of my M1 cores with only Kagi open (so it's not only WebKit). Why would anybody want bouncing clouds on a search page? They're just distracting. The whole thing looks amateurish to me and not really like something I want to pay for. One reason I don't like ads is that they often contain animations. You offer a paid search engine and there's… completely useless animations that can be turned off only by a system-wide setting.

mhitza

With the landing page tab open in Firefox (on Linux), on a 2018 i5 laptop CPU in powersave mode, Firefox keeps the CPU steadily running at around 60% with a few spikes here and there due to the animations on the landing page. I think it's cute that it shows moving clouds and stary sky, but such a hit on performance is not waranted for just a couple visual tricks.

Example page profile for a couple of seconds.

Vlad

mhitza You can already disable it (kagi listens to reduced motion system setting)

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/turning-off-animations.html#turning-off-animations

I wonder why such a hit on Firefox, using Orion/Safari on macOS has almost zero impact.