Animation: playState property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since March 2020.

The read-only Animation.playState property of the Web Animations API returns an enumerated value describing the playback state of an animation.

Value

idle

The current time of the animation is unresolved and there are no pending tasks.

running

The animation is running.

paused

The animation was suspended and the Animation.currentTime property is not updating.

finished

The animation has reached one of its boundaries and the Animation.currentTime property is not updating.

Previously, Web Animations defined a pending value to indicate that some asynchronous operation such as initiating playback was yet to complete. This is now indicated by the separate Animation.pending property.

Examples

In the Growing/Shrinking Alice Game example, players can get an ending with Alice crying into a pool of tears. In the game, for performance reasons, the tears should only be animating when they're visible. So they must be paused as soon as they are animated like so:

js
// Setting up the tear animations

tears.forEach((el) => {
  el.animate(tearsFalling, {
    delay: getRandomMsRange(-1000, 1000), // randomized for each tear
    duration: getRandomMsRange(2000, 6000), // randomized for each tear
    iterations: Infinity,
    easing: "cubic-bezier(0.6, 0.04, 0.98, 0.335)",
  });
  el.pause();
});

// Play the tears falling when the ending needs to be shown.

tears.forEach((el) => {
  el.play();
});

// Reset the crying tears animations and pause them.

tears.forEach((el) => {
  el.pause();
  el.currentTime = 0;
});

Specifications

Specification
Web Animations
# dom-animation-playstate

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobile
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
playState

Legend

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Full support
Full support
See implementation notes.

See also