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Optical illusion in Firefox

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Select "About Mozilla Firefox" from the "Help" menu.
  2. Click the "Credits" button.
  3. Read the credits as they scroll by.
  4. After the end of the credits list (don't bother trying to read the copyright stuff at the bottom), look at somthing else, such as the titlebar of the About Mozilla Firefox dialog.

Result:

At least for me, the titlebar appears to sag.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 25th, 2005 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Mozilla, Perception. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

13 Responses to “Optical illusion in Firefox”

  1. ant Says:
    November 25th, 2005 at 4:35 pm

    Doesn’t do it for me… :/
    Maybe it depends on the title bar colours, I’m using blackbox which has a fairly grey default theme.

  2. Jesse Ruderman Says:
    November 25th, 2005 at 4:45 pm

    It might help to try to keep your eyes around the middle of the area where text scrolls.

  3. Jaosn Barnabe Says:
    November 25th, 2005 at 4:53 pm

    Haven’t you ever noticed the effect when watching movie credits? As soon as they stop scrolling, it looks like everything else is moving down.

  4. Jesse Ruderman Says:
    November 25th, 2005 at 4:59 pm

    No, I hadn’t noticed the same effect with movie credits, but I’ll look for it in the future.

  5. David Naylor Says:
    November 25th, 2005 at 5:42 pm

    Yeah, I can see it too, sorta.

  6. Caspar Says:
    November 25th, 2005 at 6:51 pm

    Nope. But the scroll is definitely not smooth at the end (the copyright stuff).
    (FF 1.5 RC3 OSX ~ iBook 12″)

  7. Jonathan Says:
    November 25th, 2005 at 9:30 pm

    Wow, I never noticed before how jerky the credits scrolling was.

  8. James Pole Says:
    November 26th, 2005 at 12:03 am

    I notice the same effects as Caspar. The copyright part is rather shocking, it skips and shutters quite a bit. I’m using the Fredora Core 4’s Firefox v1.0.7 build which is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050922.

  9. Ritchie Says:
    November 26th, 2005 at 2:16 am

    I’m on OS X 10.4.3 with FF 1.5 RC3.

    – Credits are jerky at some point.
    – Copyright stuff goes slower as it reaches the end.
    – Nothing happanes to the Dialog’s title bar.

    Cheers,

    Ritchie

  10. James Says:
    November 26th, 2005 at 4:19 am

    I thought it was thoughtful and appropriate to include Nigel McFarlane. I wanted to mention that before, but I thought nobody read the credits.

  11. James Says:
    November 26th, 2005 at 4:40 am

    I’m going to throw this random link out there. It concerns making firefox’s memory footprint significantly, 5.5 times, smaller. Not my biggest concern; however, for many users it is. Interesting concept. Interesting reading. Saw on digg.com

    http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2005-11.html

  12. Nils Says:
    November 27th, 2005 at 3:41 pm

    Watch a tall waterfall for about a minute (keeping your gaze on the same spot) and then look at the rocks next to the waterfall. The effect is geologically impressive. I highly recommend trying it.

  13. Scott Says:
    December 3rd, 2005 at 1:11 am

    I don’t have the patience to wait for all those names to scroll, but thanks anyway. ;-)