Kevin Powell - Community•14mo ago

Flickering responsive nav menu on screen resize

So I'm working on a responsive nav menu, and it flickers on the resizing of the screen. See added video. It also does it when there is no JS. Codepen of a very simplified version of the nav (the same still happens): https://codepen.io/-evecodes/pen/GRYpKmW I tried following one of Kevin's nav tutorials for it. His navigation does work without the flickering, but when I try to make it, it fails. The tutorial was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbBMp6yUXO0 Any help/thoughts on how to possibly fix this are welcome!

-eve

CodePen

Mobile nav - test 01

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Kevin Powell

YouTube

Responsive navbar tutorial using HTML CSS & JS

You can find the Frontend Mentor project here: https://www.frontendmentor.io/challenges/space-tourism-multipage-website-gRWj1URZ3 And the free Scrimba course here: https://scrimba.com/learn/spacetravel 🔗 Links ✅ Why I use HSL: https://youtu.be/Ab9pHqhsfcc ✅ More on feature queries (@supports): https://youtu.be/wPI8CEoheSk ✅ More info on .sr-...

4 Replies

-eve•14mo ago

Managed to fix it. I removed the translateX, and used the left/right/etc properties instead. Also added the transition on those.

    .nav-items-box {
        position: fixed;
        overflow: hidden;        
        top: 0;
        left: -60%;
        right: auto;        
        bottom: 0;
        flex-direction: column;        
        background-color: var(--main-color-90percent);    
        align-items: start;
        z-index: 1500;        
        transition: left 250ms ease-out;
    }

    [data-nav-mobile="active"] {        
        left: 0;
    }

    .nav-items-box {
        position: fixed;
        overflow: hidden;        
        top: 0;
        left: -60%;
        right: auto;        
        bottom: 0;
        flex-direction: column;        
        background-color: var(--main-color-90percent);    
        align-items: start;
        z-index: 1500;        
        transition: left 250ms ease-out;
    }

    [data-nav-mobile="active"] {        
        left: 0;
    }

Kevin Powell•14mo ago

As a bit of a heads up, it's generally preferred to transition/animate transform rather than positioning properties for performance reasons. Worst case is to use JS to deactivate all transitions when the browser is being resized

-eve•14mo ago

Ah, I didn't know that, thanks! I'll look into a JS based solution.

-eve•14mo ago

So, I managed to make a JS solution to this problem as well. I noticed that the glitching only happened when my media query triggered so I focused towards that. I split the transition css seperate, and using data-attributes (with setAttribute) instead of classes, I added it to a JS media query (same width as my regular mq). This solved the issue in Chrome and Edge. Firefox was still being glitchy unless I resized my browser really really slow. The CSS added was: (before mq)

[data-nav-links-transition="off"] {
    transition: none;
}

[data-nav-links-transition="off"] {
    transition: none;
}

(mq)

[data-nav-links-transition="active"] {
    transition: transform 250ms ease-out;
}

[data-nav-links-transition="active"] {
    transition: transform 250ms ease-out;
}

For Firefox I had to add a setTimeout/clearTimeout, the timeout set to 0, this helped with the glitching here. Final JS code for the glitch fix:

const mediaQueryNavWidth = window.matchMedia('(min-width: 78.5em)');

function transitionToggle(mediaQueryNavWidth) {
    if (mediaQueryNavWidth.matches){
        clearQuickTimer()
        NavItemsBox.setAttribute('data-nav-links-transition', 'off');
    } else {
        quickTimerSetAttribute();   
    }
}

function quickTimerSetAttribute() {
    setTimeout( e=> {        
        NavItemsBox.setAttribute('data-nav-links-transition', 'active');
    }, 0 ); 
}

function clearQuickTimer() {
    clearTimeout(setTimeout);  
}

transitionToggle(mediaQueryNavWidth);

mediaQueryNavWidth.addEventListener('change', transitionToggle);

const mediaQueryNavWidth = window.matchMedia('(min-width: 78.5em)');

function transitionToggle(mediaQueryNavWidth) {
    if (mediaQueryNavWidth.matches){
        clearQuickTimer()
        NavItemsBox.setAttribute('data-nav-links-transition', 'off');
    } else {
        quickTimerSetAttribute();   
    }
}

function quickTimerSetAttribute() {
    setTimeout( e=> {        
        NavItemsBox.setAttribute('data-nav-links-transition', 'active');
    }, 0 ); 
}

function clearQuickTimer() {
    clearTimeout(setTimeout);  
}

transitionToggle(mediaQueryNavWidth);

mediaQueryNavWidth.addEventListener('change', transitionToggle);

Here's a codepen with the live code: https://codepen.io/-evecodes/pen/QWZyXEB In summary, my best guess for this glitching happening was that the added classes/attributes weren't acting fast enough when the media query triggered? From what I noticed the data-attributes were the fastest, but I read online that usually classes are? It's a bit of a headscratcher for sure haha.

-eve

CodePen

Mobile nav test - 02

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Gaming

Programming

Flickering responsive nav menu on screen resize