Chip Cullen

June 22, 2023

Last night I added some View Transitions to this very site, in production.

In order to see them, you need to have Chrome 114 or later [editor's note: I originally thought you needed 115, but I found that the below flags exist in 114, and the feature works], and have these flags enabled:

• chrome://flags#view-transition
• chrome://flags#view-transition-on-navigation

Not only is this site using the View Transition API, but it's using the MPA API.

... and by MPA - I mean website.

FULL CREDIT: I got the idea, and copied and pasted liberally from, Dave Rupert's excellent blog post about doing the same thing.

I added this meta tag, and I was in business:

<meta name="view-transition" content="same-origin" />

A few key differences that I needed to make that are different from what Dave did:

• Because my header changes from the home page to my post view, I made the root html element my view-transition-name element.

:root {
  ...
  view-transition-name: root;
}

I also found that I needed to take the reverse tack when accommodating users who prefer reduced motion:

@keyframes fade {
  from {
    opacity: 1;
  }

  to {
    opacity: 0;
  }
}

/* Old stuff coming out */
::view-transition-old(root) {
  animation: fade 0.2s linear forwards;
}

/* New stuff coming in */
::view-transition-new(root) {
  animation: fade 0.3s linear reverse;
}

@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) {
  ::view-transition-old(root),
  ::view-transition-new(root) {
    animation-duration: 0.001s;
  }
}

But that works pretty well in my testing.

And the best part - this is a progressive enhancement. If you don't have a browser that supports view transitions, my links are ... links. But if you do have support for view transitions, it's a pretty slick experience.

Personally I think that this is one of the most exciting things to happen to the web platform in a long time. This will make it dead simple for websites to make experiences that feel smoother and more intuitive, something that "apps" have had an advantage in for a long time.