Hi. I have two main Mac computers that I browse the web with, a 2020 iMac 27 with 6-core Intel i5 and Radeon Pro 5300 GPU. My secondary computer is an older mid-2012 MacB… (read more)
Hi. I have two main Mac computers that I browse the web with, a 2020 iMac 27 with 6-core Intel i5 and Radeon Pro 5300 GPU. My secondary computer is an older mid-2012 MacBook Pro with dual core Intel i5 and HD Graphics 4000.
I am aware this Macbook is over a decade old now, and I plan on getting a much newer model within the next couple months. For now, I'll have to make do with this when my iMac is busy with other tasks (mostly rendering video). I have installed all the latest Mac OS updates the Macbook can support, which is Catalina, and Firefox is also the most current version 124.0.1 64-bit.
I tend to use Instagram via Firefox for the most part, and on the iMac, there are these little animations when doing things like double-clicking posts to like them, which causes a small flying heart to appear on the post for about a second. Flipping through multi-image posts is also animated when clicking the left and right buttons, resulting in a slide animation between photos. Small text pop ups also have animation as well.
However, using Firefox on my Macbook, those animations don't appear. I've enabled hardware acceleration, and the animations still don't appear. I've also whitelisted Instagram in uBlock Origin, and the result is the same.
I tested other websites that I can compare with the iMac, like Google Maps and the official Nintendo Animal Crossing website. Both sites run smoothly on my Macbook, with all animations functioning like they should, and Google Street view also being smooth with no visual glitches or other reduced functionality.
I will note the screen resolution on the Macbook is 1366 x 768 compared to the large iMac. My question is this... is Instagram disabling these UI animations on my Macbook due to it's age and/or screen size, is Firefox doing that, or is this a bug in regards to Mac OS Catalina?
These are very simple animations, so it's strange that they don't appear on my Macbook, despite it still being capable of showing web page animations with other sites. The Like animation in particular is helpful as it provides visual feedback to my preferred way of liking posts there.