This simple effect reminds me of the hey day of horrible animated GIF files, entertaining nonetheless and pretty awesome that this kind of effect can be done without using images.
Aside: David DeSandro is awesome. His jQuery Masonry plugin has saved me so many times when I've been tasked to build a horizontal site.
Oh I see... FYI: Click on the background somewhere near text. I was clicking on links and you dont get the 'smush' effect unless you click on the background....and hovering over links gives a rainbow colored effect.
Nice hack (especially when you're clicking around), but what caught my eye was that maybe for the first time, Safari is actually waaay faster than Chrome or Firefox.
This is (roughly) the framerate I got when I tried it on the these three browsers (all latest versions, Windows Vista):
Safari: 60 fps (or 30, or whatever "completely smooth" means)
Chrome: 20 fps (compared to Safari)
Firefox: 30 fps (compared to Safari)
But why? Chrome has always been the fastest (on Windows - on Mac, Safari is somewhat smoother for me)???
From what I can tell, requestAnimationFrame in Chrome runs at a slower frame rate. I've had a similar experience with a plugin i'm writing. Maybe I was doing something wrong but requestAnimationFrame was firing once for every ~10 actual frames in Chrome.
I enabled it and... much to my surprise, the frame rate dropped significantly. It's now like 3 (three) frames per second (it's so slow I am able to actually count the frames!)
The "hover" animation (rainbow thing) is fine, 100% smooth. But the exploding animation is just ridiculously slow.
Then I set it to be disabled and the frame rate improved a little.
hover? seriously? Didn't mouseovers become a big design no-no, now that tablets are in and PCs are out? I hope I remember to check this later when I'm on my laptop.
Aside: David DeSandro is awesome. His jQuery Masonry plugin has saved me so many times when I've been tasked to build a horizontal site.