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You May Not Need a Slider — At Least For Mobile Browsers

Approximately more than 85% of our visitors access yemek.com from mobile browsers.

Most of us have used a slider at least once in the components or somewhere in projects. In yemek.com, we were using react-slick which works well on desktop but causes some performance and memory leak problems on mobile browsers.

See here:

Memory Leaks! · Issue #1257 · akiran/react-slick

Forced reflow — Performance bottleneck · Issue #1274 · akiran/react-slick

It was causing a freezing bug while scrolling and tapping the hamburger menu that affects user experience extremely bad. Also, the bundle size for react-slick is 14.5kB minified + gzipped.

Bundle Size and Download Time of react-slick@0.25.2

However, we’ve decided not to use any third-party sliders for mobile browsers to increase performance and user experience.

Let’s start by creating a component called Slider.js. (We’re using emotion for CSS-in-JS but you can use styled-components of course.)

We’ll have a Container and children of it. So the Container should be scrolled horizontally and shouldn’t be scrolled vertically.

Container div will look like this:

const Container = styled.div`
  white-space: nowrap;
  overflow-x: auto;
  overflow-y: hidden;
  padding-left: 18px;
  padding-right: 18px;
  padding-bottom: 18px;
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-left: -24px;
  margin-right: -24px;
  -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
  -ms-overflow-style: none;
  scrollbar-width: none;
`;

and the children will get a width as a prop to size it correctly. It will look like this:

const Slider = props => {
  const { children, childWidth, ...rest } = props;
  const Container = styled.div`
    white-space: nowrap;
    overflow-x: auto;
    overflow-y: hidden;
    padding-left: 18px;
    padding-right: 18px;
    padding-bottom: 18px;
    margin-top: 0;
    margin-left: -24px;
    margin-right: -24px;
    -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
    -ms-overflow-style: none;
    scrollbar-width: none;
    
    > * {
      padding: 0 6px;
      display: inline-block;
      white-space: normal;
      word-break: break-word;
      vertical-align: top;
      width: ${childWidth};
    }
  `;
  return (
    <Container {...rest}>
      {children}
    </Container>
  );
};

The overall of Slider.js component will look this as well:

import React from 'react';
import PropTypes from 'prop-types';
import styled from '@emotion/styled';
const Slider = props => {
  const { children, childWidth, ...rest } = props;
  const Container = styled.div`
    white-space: nowrap;
    overflow-x: auto;
    overflow-y: hidden;
    padding-left: 18px;
    padding-right: 18px;
    padding-bottom: 18px;
    margin-top: 0;
    margin-left: -24px;
    margin-right: -24px;
    -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
    -ms-overflow-style: none;
    scrollbar-width: none;
    
    > * {
      padding: 0 6px;
      display: inline-block;
      white-space: normal;
      word-break: break-word;
      vertical-align: top;
      width: ${childWidth};
    }
  `;
  return (
    <Container {...rest}>
      {children}
    </Container>
  );
};
Slider.propTypes = {
  children: PropTypes.any,
  childWidth: PropTypes.string,
};
Slider.defaultProps = {
  childWidth: ‘80%’,
};
export default Slider;

The result: