Hello. I know there are different people asking this question on the web: "Why are Animated GIFs (and Marquee, and probably also Blink) disabled into the Android WebView?".
I digged into the C++ and the Java side: clearly the WebPreferences object that is used to configure the WebView doesn't expose all the C+ + interface, where a method to "enable" the feature is in place. My first reaction is a reasoning: probably there is some performance issues, so they prefer to loose this small thing... Even though I don't really see where a user could run a page with a GIF "so much" to drain the battery and "overtake the CPU", I assumed that the Googlers know better then me. But then I discovered something funny: the Google Apps for Mobile, on startup, they have a "busy animated icon". How they do that? I faked the User-Agent from Firefox and, with the great Firebug, caught the small piece of code that does the trick. It's a "CANVAS". This means that the animation is programmed in Javascript. Ok. Now my question is: isn't this approach of doing the animation worse than doing with an Animated Gif? I mean, I could understand that clearing and re-drawing a small part of the browser buffer repeatedly (with a GIF) can be "cpu-bound" for a mobile device (even thought I do the same thing on S60 device and I never had this impression at all, even with other WebKit based browsers). BUT, that' the question, isn't it even more CPU-bound doing it with Javascript? The redrawing is there anyway. And there is also the computation of the Javascript. With a normal GIF, a lot of optimization in this are made inside the C+ + part: here is all left to Javascript. I hope a Google could answer this question. Cheers --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
