EuiLoading components are no longer animated if the browser has no prefers-reduced-motion support

[wenchonglee]

Hey,

This is a weird one. I received feedback from someone using Chrome version 73 that the loading components are no longer animated.

Problems with older browsers are always a pain (why wouldn't you just update the browser?!)
I later managed to reproduce this using the browserling web app that emulates older browsers, you can see that the loading icons are stuck in place and not animated.

I think this is due to the PR #4835 when prefers-reduced-motion was added into the mix, see MDN for the supported browsers. I can also confirm that the animations were running before this version was released.

Can I suggest that we keep animations for unsupported browsers?

[cchaos]

Thanks for reporting this @wenchonglee. You are right in that it's specifically not supported in Chrome v. 73 and lower. We added this in as a direct enhancement to our accessibility goals and understood the implications of using a newer method.

We like to use CanIUse to see the breakdown of browser support, and unfortunately, v73 is already 2 years old and falls within only 1.2% of browser usages. Globally prefers-reduced-motion is supported by 91% of browsers being used. It is certainly a rare case, but we need to consider the maintenance costs of trying to support anything less than the latest 2 versions of current browsers.

Sorry we can't directly help your customer in this situation.