Animated website header

Hi! The new animated and interactive header of the website is cool (see e.g. https://igraph.org/r/doc/cluster_optimal.html) , but it is relatively GPU intensive, taxing my integrated GPU (Intel UHD Graphics 630) around 40%.
This is not a big deal in general, but it is annoying when I am battery powered, and I image that for older graphic cards is bad enough to start spinning the fans loud.

A “pause” button or something similar (maybe persistent through sessions) may be an elegant solution!

@tamas Just an idea (I don’t know how easy or hard it is to implement):

Keep the animation on the front page, but not on the documentation pages (or compromise on the doc pages in a different way). I expect it is only the documentation pages that people need to keep open for extended times.

Hmmm, I was under the impression that most browsers are smart enough to pause or throttle the animation when the browser is not in the foreground or the animation is scrolled off-screen. Anyway, I think the easiest is simply to remove the animation from the documentation pages, but keep it on the front pages. I’ll look into this.

Okay, the animation is now removed from the documentation pages - it is active only on the main pages where the user is not likely to spend too much time anyway.

Thanks Tamas,
here on Chrome 79.0.3945.130 64 bits under Windows, looking at gpu usage the animation stops if the tab is closed. Scrolling down the page gives inconsistent results: sometimes it stops, sometimes keeps using the gpu, others stops after a few seconds

Now it looks a bit plain though. How do you feel about a static replacement? Proof of concept:

Here’s an SVG version of the above. It could be used as a static replacement. I can easily make these with various random seeds in arbitrary sizes.