CSS3 animations are cool because they have the potential to be superior, but 3 out of 4 times it seems that the equivalent JS/$.animate is smoother and more consistent.
It's the not the reality I want, but it's the one I've been shown.
It's very situational. I built a rich SPA with lots of animations a few years ago and sometimes I would have no issues and other times animations would chug on one or two browsers. I haven't done animation work in the past couple of years but I used GSAP for that product and it was great. It's very tough to navigate the animation world because fades work great in context A on FireFox but work like crap in the same context on Safari. You might see the opposite on context B with a different animation.
Hopefully in a few more years we will see better and more consistent performance across all browsers, but we aren't quite there yet with CSS
CSS3 animations are cool because they have the potential to be superior, but 3 out of 4 times it seems that the equivalent JS/$.animate is smoother and more consistent.
It's the not the reality I want, but it's the one I've been shown.