Show HN: CSS generator for a high-def glass effect
Cross-browser compatibility is actually the reason I rely on ::before and ::after pseudo-elements to build up the effect. Move the color/opacity to the main element, and you’ll get weird color bleed on the corners in Chrome. Move the texture, and it muddles the bevel’s specular highlight. Move the bevel, and it gets blurred out by the backdrop-filter. And so on!
Layers include: * Adjustable blur, brightness, and saturation (backdrop-filter) * Subtle translucent texture * Faux 3D bevel (using box-shadows, not an outline)
Glassmorphism is rather heavy on resources, so it’s best used as an accent and avoided on wide desktop elements. Should be compatible with recent versions of Chrome, Safari, and Firefox (desktop and mobile). If you spot bugs or rendering glitches, I’d love to know!
Side note: this is an early preview of a framework-agnostic glass SCSS/component library I’m building.
But missing out on the refractive aspect of glass takes away the strong visual separation of layers that IMO is Liquid Glass's biggest contribution.
Material has these wonderful designer resources showing how the app ought to be built of consistent moving layers, shown in 3D from the side. It's clear that there's these layers. But once you go 2d, put it all together, its incredibly hard for me to find all the features. The number of times that there's an action button in some corner that folks don't see massive. Motion sort of helps highlight the chrome vs content, but there's just so little thats visually defining.
Liquid Glass's biggest strength IMO is the edge distortion. That when the content moves, there's this non-linear motion that the human visual sense immediately picks up on. Static screenshots don't always look great, but in motion there's so much more distinction of elements than anything else I've seen.
And that key refractive element, that takes such huge advantage of human's motion sensing, is missing here.
I'd seen one other great web web demo, but am struggling to find it right now. I did find this one, which I don't think looks as good, and the performance is bad for me here on mobile. But it nicely breaks down steps and shows how complex a task this can be. Getting these edge distortions in is hard, and relying on SVG filters to do it is a brutal path to hack together. https://atlaspuplabs.com/blog/liquid-glass-but-in-css#breaki...
There is a collection of attempts (CodePen Spark) at Liquid Glass that I just found. Second link is one I thought did a pretty nice job, via very specifically pre defined / hard coded SVG. https://codepen.io/spark/453 https://codepen.io/lucasromerodb/pen/vEOWpYM
Do you have a sense of which aspects are the most resource-intensive? Naively I would guess it's the backdrop-filter.