Using calc inside CSS3 transform in Internet Explorer

/ June 13, 2018/ Frontend General

(Last Updated On: October 7, 2018)

You have probably been in this situation. You need to animate some element position based on other elements using calc() inside transform and it does no work.

Internet Explorer has several bugs quirks and the inability of use calc() inside a transform is one of them. A good workaround is just to use the ability of the browser to parse parallel transform functions.

If we need to do this:

To work around this, you can chain transforms. For instance, the following statements are equivalent:

transform: translateX(calc(100% - 10px + 65px - 93px));

We could just write each calc() value in their own translateX property:

transform: translateX(100%) translateX(-10px) translateX(+65px) translateX(-93px));

The browser (Internet Explorer included) will move the element one translateX at the time and the result will be the same as using all inside a calc() function.