The right way to disable CSS animations

Sometimes I want a way to disable all CSS animations on a page. This is useful for end-to-end testing, automatic screenshots, or reducing motion sickness risk. This recent CSS Tricks post suggests disabling animations & transitions while resizing, to reduce needless browser work. This is an excellent idea! Here is the usual way of disabling animations:

.resize-animation-stopper * {
  transition: none !important;
  animation: none !important;
}

The problem with setting none is that transitionend and animationend events will no longer be fired. Maybe not a big deal, but it could also prevent stuff from working as you expect.

This contrived example animates the border color on hover, and once that's finished sets the background color. But when animations are disabled, the background color never gets set!

Andy Bell's modern CSS reset adds a media query for prefers-reduced-motion to disable animations for people who don't want them. This originally used the none to disable, but was later changed to instead use a very short duration (setting times lower than 0.01s can cause flickering)

.resize-animation-stopper * {
  animation-duration: 0.01ms !important;
  animation-iteration-count: 1 !important;
  transition-duration: 0.01ms !important;
  scroll-behavior: auto !important;
}

This means animations will end (almost) instantly, and not repeat. The scroll-behaviour: auto ensures that smooth scrolling is disabled.

Not quite as tidy as just writing none, but guarantees your page works for everyone regardless of motion preferences.