Scrolling on Chromium browsers might soon be as good as the classic Edge, thanks to Microsoft

RV_ · April 21, 2019

Microsoft has worked to integrate the Chrome base code into Edge browser and by working together Chrome now has advantages from Microsoft's work on Chrome. Interesting read!

Excerpt:

"Open source platforms only flourish when software giants like Microsoft actively contribute to them. This is exactly what’s happening in the Chromium world.

Now that Microsoft Edge is also a beneficiary of the open source platform Chromium, Microsoft is working on a new feature that would make scrolling in Chromium browsers as good as the classic Edge browser.

To make scrolling experience a lot Edge(classic)-like, Microsoft is planning to move the composite scrollbar to the impl thread. This will let users continue to interact with and scroll using scrollbars even when the main thread is busy.

Microsoft explains, “Scrollbar scrolling using the mouse happens on the main thread in Chromium. If the main thread is busy (due to reasons like long running JS, etc), scrolling by clicking on the scrollbar will appear to be janky as the events keep getting queued up on the MainThreadEventQueue, waiting for the main thread to free up.”

“We observe on average scrollbar drags have ~2-4x higher latency in Chromium as compared to EdgeHTML today, worse on particularly busy sites. We attribute this gap primarily to EdgeHTML’s feature for off-thread scrollbar drags. By avoiding the main thread in Chromium as well, we believe we can bring the performance of scrollbar drags more in line with what we observe in EdgeHTML.”

More and how to use it in Chrome here: https://mspoweruser.com/scrolling-on-chromium-browsers-might-soon-be-as-good-as-the-classic-edge-thanks-to-microsoft/

Darryl&Rita · April 21, 2019

Sounds a lot like a fix for a non-issue. 2-4 times a barely noticeable time lag seems like a Monte Python fleshwound comment. Edge has so many other things going against it, for me personally.

RV_ · April 21, 2019

Oops, double post

Edited April 21, 2019 by RV_

RV_ · April 21, 2019

On 4/21/2019 at 11:40 AM, Darryl&Rita said:

Sounds a lot like a fix for a non-issue. 2-4 times a barely noticeable time lag seems like a Monte Python fleshwound comment. Edge has so many other things going against it, for me personally.

Darryl, ??

I use Firefox??

This was about how Microsoft helped Chrome and made it better, not Edge, and the benefits to both from working together. Edge has changed to a Chrome base, not the old base Edge had in what is now called classic Edge. If you click on the article you will find it is about Chrome not Edge benefitting alone. You see the open source community, Google, and Microsoft are now working together to the benefit of all.

Are you under the mythconception this was an attempt to influence folks to switch to edge?

Click on the links I always provide to the source for clarification.

Excerpt from the article I linked to, and the above was about:

"Proposal accepted

The good news is the contribution from Microsoft was reviewed and approved by the open source community. That’s not all, Microsoft’s code has been merged into Chromium and Canary builds( via WL).

If you are using Chrome Canary you notice a flag named “Enable Compositor threaded scrollbar scrolling.” Microsoft said that all the followup changelists with regard to scrolling issues will be stagged under the flag."

More and how to use it in Chrome here: https://mspoweruser.com/scrolling-on-chromium-browsers-might-soon-be-as-good-as-the-classic-edge-thanks-to-microsoft/

Edited April 23, 2019 by RV_