jQuery Animate not working on background-color property

Question

I was playing around with the jQuery .animate() function, and ended up trying to change the background-color of one of the divs depend

Answer 1

As per jQuery API docs:

The .animate() method allows us to create animation effects on any numeric CSS property.

Animation Properties and Values

All animated properties should be animated to a single numeric value, except as noted below; most properties that are non-numeric cannot be animated using basic jQuery functionality (For example, width, height, or left can be animated but background-color cannot be, unless the jQuery.Color plugin is used)

^{emphasis is mine}

Background Color is not a numeric property and so it cannot be animated using .animate().