Rockstar’s GTA 6 website feels dramatically different on Chrome than it does in Firefox, and you will notice the difference the moment you start scrolling.

Someone shared a recording of the animations of the GTA 6 website when viewed on Firefox, and then compared the same page on Chrome. You can check out the video below:

It’s stuff like this that make me a bit jealous of Chromium’s rendering
by
u/T_rex2700 in
browsers

If you notice, when viewed on Firefox, the page renders like any other normal website with no animations. Meanwhile, on Chrome (or any other Chromium-based browser), the page is animated when you scroll. It’s basically a visual treat for folks who care for slick visuals and animations (like me).

That split lines up with the kind of effect Rockstar seems to be using here. MDN describes scroll-driven animations as CSS animations tied to scroll position rather than time, and Chrome has pushed those tools for years as a first-class way to build smooth scroll effects. Chrome’s own developer docs say scroll-driven animation support arrived in Chrome 115, which is a pretty strong hint that sites using this style tend to behave best in Chromium browsers.

It’s a different story on Firefox though. Mozilla’s own MDN docs list scroll-driven animations as an experimental feature in Firefox release builds, with the feature still controlled by the layout.css.scroll-driven-animations.enabled flag. MDN also notes that some parts of the stack are still not supported by default on release. Simply put, Firefox can manage some of this, but it isn’t as ready-to-use as Chrome.

Several web developers jumped into the conversation to defend their daily workflow. One developer explained that it’s easy to build these features for Chromium in just a few minutes, while making them function correctly in Firefox often requires hours of debugging. They argue the engineering cost of fighting Mozilla’s specific engine quirks makes dropping support for Firefox the logical choice for many development teams. Another developer agreed and mentioned that porting features to Chrome sometimes requires hunting down proprietary Google APIs.

Firefox defenders argue that Rockstar’s development team likely favored Chromium-specific APIs instead of utilizing open web standards. They point out that web designers usually focus their testing strictly on the top two or three browsers to save time and corporate money. Firefox now holds a tiny slice of the global desktop market share, sitting somewhere around two to five percent. They claim this low market share means massive companies don’t have any financial incentive to optimize their flashy marketing sites for a small group of Mozilla users.

That said, you can still hack your way around these limitations by installing an extension that allows you to switch your browser user agent to Chromium. Additionally, the GTA 6 website lets you force the animations, but neither works as smoothly as on Chrome.

Of course, this isn’t a major deal-breaker for a lot of people, but it just goes to show that Chrome (Chromium-based browsers in general) are usually the preferred choice for developers.

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