Level of SVG SMIL (animation) support among the browsers

Question

Hi,

Does anyone know the current state of SVG SMIL animation support in the popular browsers? It looks like Safari, Chrome, and Opera support it. Firefox has confusing reports in their dev pages about SMIL support having been added, but I don't see it as of v3.6:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216462

I am ignoring IE since they don't even support SVG at all, and probably never will, much less SMIL.

The other thing - just comparing this test page between Safari, Chrome, and Opera:

http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/ovaling.svg

looks like Opera is the only one that renders it correctly. Should we not be using SMIL - kind of looks half-baked in all the browsers (sadly)? Blast.

Thanks

Answer 1

http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php has a rough comparison, and mentions SMIL in Firefox starting version 3.7. About IE, maybe Wednesday changes everything, see: live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/EX30

Answer 2

In my very short experience Opera's support is most complete and correct (I've played with different kinds of animation timings and behaviours and haven't noticed any bugs. Opera is the only one that fires DOM events when animations start/repeat/end).

Gecko is OK, although it doesn't fire events, and misinterpreted few more complex animations.

WebKit is the worst. Animations must have both from and to, otherwise it's easy to find bugs in additive/accumulative animations (animation state isn't reset properly or resets to wrong state). Removing animation node from DOM doesn't reset position of animated elements. It seems to have overly simplified tracking of animation state. I've managed to crash Mobile Safari.

Animation speed—at least on desktop OS X—seems to be in the same league, although animation in Opera seems to be a little less smooth than in others.

Answer 3

There is no SMIL at all in Firefox 3.6. IE 9 will do SVG, but it won't do SMIL. Microsoft believes that there are spec issues to work out before they add SMIL - and to a degree they are right, IMO. How SMIL will interact with other animations is currently an unresolved issue.

I just looked at that ovaling.svg demo again in Firefox 4 nightly (roughly at beta 2 stage) on Linux. It did drain my CPU to 77 %, whereas Opera only used 44 %. Or put differently, Opera 10.60 only used one of my two CPU-cores, Firefox used 1 and a half. The animation was really smooth in Firefox but did stutter a bit in Opera.

On my Thinkpad z61p running Linux, I do not think Firefox does any GPU acceleration (yet), but when that kicks in I suppose the CPU load would be a lot less.

Chrome 5 fails miserably. The animation won't run in any really useful way at all.