Show HN: I made CSS-only glitch effect

50 pointsposted 8 months ago
by stanko

15 Comments

justsomehnguy

8 months ago

Doesn't work on Android DDG and FF on th site, but works in both on CodePen.

stankot

8 months ago

That is weird, because it is HTML/CSS only. Do you see anything that would help me debug it? Could it be that an add-on (content blocker) messes up with it? I don't have an android device to test. I don't see any issues on desktop and ios though.

justsomehnguy

8 months ago

Quite amusingly:

site glitch doesn't work on the desktop FF too, not in any of three, with various staleness but nothing too old

works on the CodePen, but if I replace CSS there with the response of glitch.css from the Network tab - it blanks and never shows anything

no ad-blockers, no errors while loading

stankot

8 months ago

Thanks for checking, I’ll try to see what is going on.

justsomehnguy

8 months ago

Shoulda checked it in the first place:

    GET https://muffinman.io/js/posts/glitch/parser.js [HTTP/1.1 200 OK 138ms]

    Uncaught TypeError: animation is undefined
        parse https://muffinman.io/js/posts/glitch/parser.js:263
        Monorail https://muffinman.io/js/posts/glitch/monorail.js:327
        <anonymous> https://muffinman.io/js/posts/glitch/index.js:10
        <anonymous> https://muffinman.io/js/posts/glitch/index.js:5
FF 138.0.1 (May 1, 2025)

stankot

8 months ago

I've figured it out. The error means that this call fails:

    const animation = animationElement.getAnimations()[0];
As Firefox supports `getAnimations` since 2020, I figured something else is messing up with it. I've tried to enable "reduced motion" in the system settings and it broke the animation!

It is because I had force-disabled all animations on the site when this option is enabled.

I patched it, it should work now. Thank you for your help!

EDIT: typo

EDIT2: I also added simple error handling to display a message if parsing the animation fails.

Semaphor

8 months ago

Works for me on the site, FF Android

dahrkael

8 months ago

works for me in android DDG

lunaps

8 months ago

That's truly impressive, never have seen sth like that before with CSS

dlouxgit

8 months ago

This CSS glitch effect is so dope! Makes me wanna try it on my own website.

stankot

8 months ago

Go for it, and share a link!

mdrzn

8 months ago

Very interesting and beautiful effect!

nmoya

8 months ago

super cool!