Refraction is not as expensive as people would led you to believe. That said, this demo is ran at a very low resolution. Probably because it doesn't take devicePixelRatio into account. On my phone that's 3.5 so more than 12 times less pixels than would be required if you want crisp UI.

Tip: change the browser scale to 50% to double the demo's resolution

Partly because phones have smaller screen sizes. When I reduce the the browser window size the FPS improves. For full widow mode it's a bit lagging for me.

I see where you're coming from, but "on a phone" hasn't been a valid qualifier for performance benchmarks for a long time. Phones and their GPUs are ridiculously powerful nowadays. We've been smoothly running 3D apps on GPUs with orders of magnitude less MFLOPS 20 years ago already. Apps and games with far more going on than blurry glassy alarm clock, albeit somewhat less beautiful. When I run Fluid Glass on a 10 year old laptop with an integrated GPU and move my cursor, I'm seeing less than 10 FPS. When will we finally start readjusting our expectations for "fast" software and stop blindly following Wirths law?

It does use a ton of energy - with clock on 4k screen my M2 macbook air CPU temperature went up 10°C in 10s and 20°C in 50s.

Yeah was also expecting my phone to get very toasty but it did not. Great job!

I noticed this pattern that a page with some text and images is often too demanding for my phone: it becomes impossible to scroll the page smoothly. We simply do not have the technology yet to handle text and images in a consistent way! But anything involving 3D graphics (or 4K video) will run just fine.

2d is more expensive than 3d to render. Video is hardware accelerated.

> We simply do not have the technology yet to handle text and images in a consistent way!

We actually have plenty of algorithms for laying out text and images very quickly. You can see this when scrolling complex PDFs or sizable books on e.g. Apple devices. Even a complex web page can be very responsive if it makes smart use of JS and async calls, etc.

Perhaps what you mean is that the complexity of current web apps running on browsers that handle arbitrary layout, computation (JS, WebAssembly), async calls (e.g. analytics), etc can be laggy on certain mobile devices? If so, yes. There are many possible culprits so to speak that lead to low frame rates.

I would phrase it this way: the combination of advertising interests, compute power, and economics have led us to a place where lots of people face laggy interfaces.

Overall, this isn’t a “technological” problem: think of technology as a set of constraints. People and their desires lead to various “design” decisions (some more evolved than designed).

See also Wirth’s Law. I don’t think it is particularly insightful, however. These kinds of laws feel more like the ironic complaints of an ennui fueled graybeard than attempts to make proactive change. From Wikipedia:

> Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

> The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, a computer scientist who discussed it in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software".

Note that some malicious and misguided right wingers are attacking and trying to subvert Wikipedia.