worker orbs: let the toggle win over reduce-effects (experiment)

Reduce-effects used to force-kill the worker orbs (isEnabled() had && !_reduceEffectsActive),
which also made the orb toggle a dead setting whenever reduce-effects was on.

The assumption was "the orbs ARE the expensive thing." On inspection that looks wrong: the
dashboard orb glow is drawn with canvas radial gradients, not a CSS blur(28px). The genuinely
expensive blur is the SIDEBAR aura orbs + frosted glass (CSS filters), which reduce-effects
still kills via filter:none regardless. So the orb canvas's per-frame cost should be moderate,
not the blur-rasterize lag.

So decouple them: the worker-orbs toggle controls the orbs on its own; reduce-effects keeps
killing the expensive CSS rendering but no longer gates the orbs. This also fixes the dead-toggle
conflict (the orb toggle now works under reduce-effects instead of being silently overridden).

Empirical: try it and watch the dashboard CPU. If the orb canvas under reduce-effects pushes it
back up, revert is one token — re-add `&& !window._reduceEffectsActive` to isEnabled().
This commit is contained in:
BoulderBadgeDad 2026-06-28 17:29:22 -07:00
parent a62d2d4310
commit 79383df6d8

View file

@ -1057,7 +1057,12 @@
// ── Page awareness ──
function isEnabled() {
return window._workerOrbsEnabled !== false && !window._reduceEffectsActive;
// The worker-orbs toggle controls the orbs on its own — reduce-effects no
// longer force-kills them. The orb glow is canvas radial gradients, NOT a CSS
// blur(28px) (that's the sidebar aura orbs + frosted glass, which reduce-effects
// still kills), so the per-frame cost is moderate, not the blur-rasterize lag.
// If real telemetry says otherwise, revert by re-adding `&& !window._reduceEffectsActive`.
return window._workerOrbsEnabled !== false;
}
// ── Real telemetry → pulses ──