Odd “shaking” effect when animating width with jQuery (only in Chrome!)

Question

I'm animating the width of a li element using jQuery in a simple snippet of code. I'm using hover() as the handler and .animate() to animate the width. Here is my code.

$('li').each(function() {
    //store the original width of the element in a variable
    var oldWidth = $(this).width();
    $(this).hover(
        function() {
            //when the mouse enters the element, animate width to 900px
            $(this).animate({width: '900px'}, 600, 'linear')
        },
    function() {
            //when the mouse leaves, animate back to the original width
            $(this).animate({width: oldWidth}, 350, 'linear')
        }
   );
}); 

The code is really really simple and works but with one very odd quirk in Chrome. When animating the elements in and out, the li elements "shake" as if they're really cold and were shivering. You can see the behavior here in a live example: http://missmd.org/ (edit: bug is now fixed)

I've animated a bunch of stuff before with jQuery and never seen this behavior. Is there any explanation for why it occurs and how I can get around it? I'm wondering if it's because I've floated the elements to the right and am animating to the left. The bug is maddening and detracts from the overall presentation a lot (at least to me). Anyone else seen this before?

Edit to clarify: it's not the actual li element that "shivers" it's the text within it that shakes slightly but noticeably from left to right very quickly as the animation runs. I'm stumped.

Edit two: after fiddling with the CSS a bit now I can only reproduce the effect in Chrome (21.0.1180.60 beta-m for me). In Firefox it works as intended. It also works great in IE. Very ironic that Chrome (usually great with this stuff) is giving me trouble now. Pulls hair out, checks sanity

Here is my HTML to help get to the bottom of this. We have reproduced the problem in ChrisFrancis' jsFiddle.

<nav>
    <ul class="nav">
        <li class="one">
            <a href="homeandnews/">
                <span class="title">Home and News</span>
                <br/>
                <span class="subtitle">Learn more about me and read general updates!</span>
            </a>
        </li>
    </ul>
<nav>

I'm completely stumped. This could also be a bug in Chrome/V8 JS engine and there's nothing we can do about it.

Answer 1

I changed your css: ul.nav li a, adding float: right to it and that fix the shake.

Anyway if it helps, I had the same problem when animating height of a div within another div with height:auto. Changing the height to a fix width solved it.

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

I was looking to this issue as well and this: -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; solve my problem. I add this odd shaking while using CSS3 transform on a SVG.

More info can be found here: CSS3 transform rotate causing 1px shift in Chrome

Hope it helps

Answer 3

This seems to be a bug in Chrome version 21.0.1180.60 and may also be present in other versions. Nothing wrong with the code here and I guess we just leave it up to workarounds or submitting a bug report now.

Sigh.

Answer 4

Had similar issue with shaking SVGs when there's a CSS transition applied to parent tag. I tried to apply everything I could randomly, and this fix finally helped:

svg {
  transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0);
}

Answer 5

This problem occurred with some divs when I was trying to animate another div within it. What I noticed is that it happens if the div or element has css property display:inline-block. Making the element float would have solved the problem, but inline-block was required in my case.

I noticed that the element had also vertical-align:middle css property. Changing it to vertical-align:text-bottom solved the problem. No more shaking effect in Chrome v23 (may be the bug is still persisting in newer versions).