Question

As an experiment, I created a few div’s and rotated them using CSS3.

    .items { 
        position: absolute;
        cursor: pointer;
        background: #FFC400;
        -moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 2px #E39900;
        -webkit-box-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #E39900; 
        box-shadow: 0px 0px 2px #E39900;
        -moz-border-radius: 2px; 
        -webkit-border-radius: 2px;
        border-radius: 2px;
    }

I then randomly styled them and made them draggable via jQuery.

    $('.items').each(function() {
        $(this).css({
            top: (80 * Math.random()) + '%',
            left: (80 * Math.random()) + '%',
            width: (100 + 200 * Math.random()) + 'px',
            height: (10 + 10 * Math.random()) + 'px',
            '-moz-transform': 'rotate(' + (180 * Math.random()) + 'deg)',
            '-o-transform': 'rotate(' + (180 * Math.random()) + 'deg)',
            '-webkit-transform': 'rotate(' + (180 * Math.random()) + 'deg)',
        });
    });

    $('.items').draggable();

The dragging works, but I am noticing a sudden jump while dragging the div’s only in webkit browsers, while everything is fine in Firefox.

If I remove the position: absolute style, the ‘jumping’ is even worse. I thought there was maybe a difference in the transform origin between webkit and gecko, but they are both at the centre of the element by default.

I have searched around already, but only came up with results about scrollbars or sortable lists.

Here is a working demo of my problem. Try to view it in both Safari/Chrome and Firefox. http://jsbin.com/ucehu/

Is this a bug within webkit or how the browsers render webkit?

Answer 1

This is a result of draggable’s reliance on the jquery offset() function and offset()‘s use of the native js function getBoundingClientRect(). Ultimately this is an issue with the jquery core not compensating for the inconsistencies associated with getBoundingClientRect(). Firefox’s version of getBoundingClientRect() ignores the css3 transforms (rotation) whereas chrome/safari (webkit) don’t.

here is an illustration of the issue.

A hacky workaround:

replace following in jquery.ui.draggable.js

//The element's absolute position on the page minus margins
this.offset = this.positionAbs = this.element.offset();

with

//The element's absolute position on the page minus margins
this.offset = this.positionAbs = { top: this.element[0].offsetTop, 
                                   left: this.element[0].offsetLeft };

and finally a monkeypatched version of your jsbin.