Some people didn't like the fact that the snow in my scripted SVG blog header was causing the Firefox CPU load to rail. My excuse was that I was trying to push out some content before the Holiday rush hit and I had to go travelling. Given that the season is now over, I spent about 20 minutes optimizing the script. My apologies to all those CPU fans out there for the last couple weeks...

Other than minor JavaScript tweaking (like removing parsing of strings into floats and declaring variables outside of loops, etc), I decided to just have all snowflakes active at once and to slow down the timer interval. From my side, it looks like it did the trick for Firefox 1.5 but not Opera 9 TP1 (Adobe SVG Viewer was never an issue), but I'll wait to hear from my critics 😉

If you wanted to optimize this even more at the cost of perceived randomness it would be quite simple to do in SVG. I'll probably save another entry for that, but basically it involves adding flakes randomly beforehand to a few static "snow panes" (<g> elements) and then simply sliding each pane down the image at differing speeds and positions (you can add a random drift too each pane's descent too). I think it would still look pretty cool and only require updating the position of (let's say) 4 snow "panes" instead of 50 snow flakes every tick.