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Positive and negative points of Greensock

aniek6 test
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This thread was started before GSAP 3 was released. Some information, especially the syntax, may be out of date for GSAP 3. Please see the GSAP 3 migration guide and release notes for more information about how to update the code to GSAP 3's syntax. 

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For a project I do research on Greensock.
 
My question: what are the positive things about Greensock and what are the negative things?
 
I have already found some positive points, but no negative points yet. I hope you can help me!
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Hello @aniek6 and Welcome to the GreenSock forum!

 

Well it seems you have a heard a lot of positive things about GreenSock, glad to hear that.

 

Now for the negative things about GreenSock GSAP:

  1. GreenSock has the habit of making you less stressed due to making simple animation tasks easier
  2. GreenSock will help you sleep better at night since you will be able to get projects done faster
  3. GreenSock has a great community that will selflessly help you with your questions

As you can see the negatives are a real bummer, How dare they :)

 

Happy Tweening!

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Negatives??? How dare you. <_<

 

Just kidding. :D If you hear anyone mention negatives about GSAP, it will probably be something about that fact that it's JavaScript and too hard to learn or the scripts increase the size of pages. Some may claim that CSS animations are better or faster. Most of that is not true and I'd bet most of the people that make those claims have never even tried GSAP. Here are a few blog posts that may be of interest to you:

 

https://greensock.com/jquery

https://greensock.com/transitions

https://greensock.com/css-performance

 

About the only other negative I've seen mentioned is that some of the premium plugins are not free. I personally wouldn't think of that as a negative, but there are those that think everything on the web should be completely free. In fact, most of the GSAP tools are free to use. The premium bonus plugins are part of Club GreenSock which is what keeps things moving around here. You'll find many examples of libraries that were free and are no longer around. GreenSock has been actively developing for over 10 years and the updates/fixes happen frequently. It's a pretty special collection of tools.

 

As Sir @Jonathan mentioned, it will make your work easier & more fun and the community is unlike anything I've ever seen on the interwebs. 

 

Good luck on your project and happy tweening.

:)

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Actually I have wondered that if there are people who dislike/hate GSAP or have any issues with the way GSAP works. I have occasionally googled things like 'GreenSock sucks', 'GreenSock is bad' or whatever that might show up any article where someone writes anything bad about GreenSock, and I haven't really found anything.

 

Also if there are issues for certain special cases/browsers, you will find many threads where Jack or Carl provide a quick solution to such problems.

 

Finally, I wasn't sure if I should mention Chris Heilmann. You will find countless articles of him pointing out how something is not done right etc. Couple of years ago, he wrote one article related to GreenSock and he doesn't really talk about any negatives, and if there was anything negative he wouldn't have missed the opportunity.

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Hi Aniek6,

 

Thanks for coming by and asking your question. Asking people around here what they dislike about GSAP is probably similar to asking a 5-year old what they dislike about dessert :) As you can see we have some very loyal and generous friends around here – who are contractually bound to never speak ill of GSAP (kidding).

 

In all seriousness, I encourage you to share with us any negative comments you find out there. We've found most of them to be misconceptions or innocent oversights. We'd love the opportunity to address them.

 

In case you missed it, our Why GSAP article does our best to illustrate the strengths of GSAP. Check it out: https://greensock.com/why-gsap

 

 

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Maybe negative points were not exactly the right word. Sorry for that!

 

For my project, I want to make an animation with Snap.svg or GreenSock. I'm investigating the differences between Snap.svg and GreenSock, so I can see what's the best option for me to work with.

 

It seemed useful for me to experience GreenSock's "negative" points. Or rather, the less powerful sides of GreenSock.

 

Nothing insulting for GreenSock, just information for my research :)

 

Thank you all for your comments and opinions!

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This is actually a great question and I'm grateful for all the responses thus far. I'll try to be as unfiltered as possible, taking off my green sock for a moment :)

  1. File size - GSAP does a LOT for you, solving browser inconsistencies, delivering a ton of features, blah, blah - that takes some kb. Sure, there's a CDN and GSAP's ubiquity makes the file size a non-issue in many cases, but the reality is that TweenMax is larger than most other animation libraries and if you're bundling it in your own JS file (like a Webpack bundle), it can be a tad heavy if you're only using it for a few little things. 
  2. License/cost - even though the vast majority of use cases qualify under the standard "no charge" license, some might require the special commercial license that comes with "Business Green" Club GreenSock memberships. It's not "open source" in every sense (yes, you can view the source on Github but that's not the same thing). And some of the plugins are only available to club members. I argue that the license is actually a BENEFIT, not a drawback, but some people may feel differently and that's okay. 
  3. Main thread - this isn't specific to GSAP, of course, but some would argue that CSS animations and WAAPI can get better performance than any JS library when it comes to animating transforms (scale, rotation, translateX/Y) because in some cases (when NOTHING else is animating except transforms or opacity, and the main thread is super busy, and there aren't too many transform tasks), transforms can be spun off to a different CPU thread. Sometimes that's indeed useful and can result in less jank. That being said, I've seen several cases when GSAP is actually faster than WAAPI and CSS, so it's not fair to make a blanket statement that JS libraries are always slower. https://greensock.com/js/speed.html

 

I think that about sums up the "negatives" that I've heard in the past. Of course I want to chime in with a ton of counter-arguments that dwarf the negatives, but that's not what you asked for :) 

 

As for Snap.svg, that's more of a library for creating and interacting with SVG elements, not so much animating them. Even the author of Snap.svg said that GSAP is probably the best thing for animating Snap.svg objects. So I wouldn't say that Snap.svg and GSAP are competitors at all - they're complimentary. GSAP is focused on animation - you can't create SVGs with it.  Likewise, the author of Snap.svg said it wasn't designed to do complex animations. 

 

Does that help? 

 

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14 hours ago, GreenSock said:

This is actually a great question and I'm grateful for all the responses thus far. I'll try to be as unfiltered as possible, taking off my green sock for a moment :)

  1. File size - GSAP does a LOT for you, solving browser inconsistencies, delivering a ton of features, blah, blah - that takes some kb. Sure, there's a CDN and GSAP's ubiquity makes the file size a non-issue in many cases, but the reality is that TweenMax is larger than most other animation libraries and if you're bundling it in your own JS file (like a Webpack bundle), it can be a tad heavy if you're only using it for a few little things. 
  2. License/cost - even though the vast majority of use cases qualify under the standard "no charge" license, some might require the special commercial license that comes with "Business Green" Club GreenSock memberships. It's not "open source" in every sense (yes, you can view the source on Github but that's not the same thing). And some of the plugins are only available to club members. I argue that the license is actually a BENEFIT, not a drawback, but some people may feel differently and that's okay. 
  3. Main thread - this isn't specific to GSAP, of course, but some would argue that CSS animations and WAAPI can get better performance than any JS library when it comes to animating transforms (scale, rotation, translateX/Y) because in some cases (when NOTHING else is animating except transforms or opacity, and the main thread is super busy, and there aren't too many transform tasks), transforms can be spun off to a different CPU thread. Sometimes that's indeed useful and can result in less jank. That being said, I've seen several cases when GSAP is actually faster than WAAPI and CSS, so it's not fair to make a blanket statement that JS libraries are always slower. https://greensock.com/js/speed.html

 

I think that about sums up the "negatives" that I've heard in the past. Of course I want to chime in with a ton of counter-arguments that dwarf the negatives, but that's not what you asked for :) 

 

As for Snap.svg, that's more of a library for creating and interacting with SVG elements, not so much animating them. Even the author of Snap.svg said that GSAP is probably the best thing for animating Snap.svg objects. So I wouldn't say that Snap.svg and GSAP are competitors at all - they're complimentary. GSAP is focused on animation - you can't create SVGs with it.  Likewise, the author of Snap.svg said it wasn't designed to do complex animations. 

 

Does that help? 

 

 

Yes, very useful information! Thank you alot!

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