Question

I am working on a wesbsite here: http://www.benjaminpotter.org/portfolio2/

Look at the loading splash, it looks all good but not in Firefox. Do you know why background positions being animated in jquery don’t work in Firefox? Have a look at the script attached to it called animate here.

Answer 1

As noted by dzejkej, separate values for background-position are not part of the standard and not supported by Firefox. As noted on the jQuery animate() page:

All animated properties should be animated to a single numeric value

And that means that background-position doesn’t qualify, as it requires two values, x pos and y pos.

You will have to use an animation plugin. Unfortunately, at the moment the jQuery plugins site is down, so I have provided a version that works in Firefox here:

/** jquery.bgpos.js
 * @author Alexander Farkas
 * v. 1.02
 */
(function($) {
    $.extend($.fx.step,{
        backgroundPosition: function(fx) {
            if (fx.state === 0 && typeof fx.end == 'string') {
                var start = $.curCSS(fx.elem,'backgroundPosition');
                start = toArray(start);
                fx.start = [start[0],start[2]];
                var end = toArray(fx.end);
                fx.end = [end[0],end[2]];
                fx.unit = [end[1],end[3]];
            }
            var nowPosX = [];
            nowPosX[0] = ((fx.end[0] - fx.start[0]) * fx.pos) + fx.start[0] + fx.unit[0];
            nowPosX[1] = ((fx.end[1] - fx.start[1]) * fx.pos) + fx.start[1] + fx.unit[1];
            fx.elem.style.backgroundPosition = nowPosX[0]+' '+nowPosX[1];

           function toArray(strg){
               strg = strg.replace(/left|top/g,'0px');
               strg = strg.replace(/right|bottom/g,'100%');
               strg = strg.replace(/([0-9\.]+)(\s|\)|$)/g,"$1px$2");
               var res = strg.match(/(-?[0-9\.]+)(px|\%|em|pt)\s(-?[0-9\.]+)(px|\%|em|pt)/);
               return [parseFloat(res[1],10),res[2],parseFloat(res[3],10),res[4]];
           }
        }
    });
})(jQuery);

Please see this page for reference on it’s use.