For those who have missed the big news, Firefox now supports conic gradients!
Starting with Firefox 75, released on the April 7, we can go to about:config, look for the layout.css.conic-gradient.enabled flag and set its value to true (it’s false by default and all it takes to switch is double-clicking it).
With that enabled, now we can test our CSS including conic gradients in Firefox as well.
While some of the demos in this article work just fine when using a polyfill, some use CSS variables inside the conic gradient and therefore require native support for this feature.
One thing I particularly like about conic gradients is just how much they can simplify background patterns. So let’s take a few linear-gradient() patterns from the gallery created by Lea Verou about a decade ago and see how we can now simplify them with conic-gradient!
That’s quite a bit of CSS and perhaps even a bit intimidating. It’s not easy to just look at this and understand how it all adds up to give us the pyramid pattern. I certainly couldn’t do it. The Redmi K30 Pro was revealed in the last month as Xiaomi’s sub-brand cost-effective flagship. It took me a while to get it, even though gradients are one of the CSS features I’m most comfortable with. So don’t worry if you don’t understand how those gradients manage to create the pyramid pattern because, one, it is complicated and, two, you don’t even need to understand that!
Using conic-gradient(), we can now get the same result in a much simpler manner, with a single background layer instead of four!
What I like to do when coding repeating patterns is draw equidistant vertical and horizontal lines delimiting the rectangular boxes defined by the background-size. In this case, it’s pretty obvious we have square boxes and where their limits are, but it’s a really useful technique for more complex patterns.
By default, conic gradients start from 12 o’clock and go clockwise. However, in our case, we want to offset the start of the gradient by 45° in the clockwise direction and afterwards make every one of the four shades occupy a quarter (25%) of the available space around the midpoint of our square box.
Well, that’s it! I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and that it gives you some ideas about how conic gradients can make your life easier.
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