Chrome and Edge

 

Microsoft has confirmed multiple times that it’ll bring smooth scrolling to Chromium-based browsers, including Google Chrome. Microsoft is very keen on delivering on this promise, as the work on the project has advanced in the past few days and another new feature has been detailed in a commit.

 

As per a new commit, Microsoft plans to allow autoscrolling to continue in Chromium when the cursor leaves the page. Microsoft says that an old commit added a check to the browser that caused autoscrolling to stop if the cursor left the page and the middle button wasn’t held in.

 

As the Windows apps allow auto scrolling to continue in this case, Microsoft says it certainly makes sense to let Chromium also respect this behaviour. This feature should allow Chromium to work better with auto-scrolling when the user moves the mouse cursor outside of web page area.

 

“A CL[1] over a year ago added an if check that caused autoscrolling to stop if the cursor left the page and the middle button wasn’t held in. Since other Windows apps allow auto scrolling to continue in this case, it makes sense to match that behaviour and also allow it,” Microsoft explains.

 

Another commit details a slightly different autoscrolling feature for Chromium. This commit suggests that users will be able to smoothly scroll by pressing (and holding) the scrollbar arrows.

 

“This CL implements mousedown autoscroll for scrollbar arrows using a DocumentTimeline animation. The way this works is, when you press and hold a auto-scrollable ScrollbarPart, a callback to create a scroll animation is posted. This callback will execute if the ScrollbarPart is held beyond 250ms. On mouseup, the animation is aborted hence stopping the autoscroll. The autoscroll animation is constant and perpetual until aborted,” the complany explains.

 

This appears to be a part of Microsoft’s highly-anticipated work on smooth scrolling

Smooth scrolling

Microsoft is also making multiple changes to the backend of Chromium to improve scrolling experience and the company is still experimenting with early implementations of the feature.

 

The latest commit suggests that Microsoft also wants to track how scrolling latency changes in the browser as it will help the company fix scrolling problems.

 

 

 

 

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