Microsoft improves Scrollbar Scrolling for Chromium based browsers

Last night Microsoft released a new update for Edge Canary and Edge Dev users. The new update brought new changes and improvements as well as introduced a new feature which aims to improve scrolling on Chromium browsers. Currently, Chromium browsers struggle to scroll using the vertical scrollbar when the main thread is busy.

Microsoft has now managed to fix the issue using Compositor Threaded Scrollbar scrolling which has been added to both Edge Canary and Edge Dev channel. You can try out the new feature using a website Microsoft has created. To experiment with the feature follow the steps below:

• Open Edge Canary or Dev and disable “Compositor Threaded Scrollbar Scrolling” flag.
• Now restart the browser and head to this demo website created by Microsoft.
• Now click on “Start animation” and “Induce main thread jank” on the top left corner.
• Now use the vertical scrollbar and you will notice the lag while dragging the scrollbar down.
• Once done, you can go back and enable the “Compositor Threaded Scrollbar Scrolling” flag.
• Now go back to the website and try the vertical scrollbar after enabling “Start animation” and “Induce main thread jank.” You should notice the difference in scrolling experience.

We’ve rolled out new scrolling improvements in Canary and Dev that make scrolling via scrollbar more responsive when the main thread is busy (for example, during long-running JavaScript).

Try it out and let us know what you think! More scrolling improvements coming soon. pic.twitter.com/akHxRlKOCh

— Microsoft Edge Dev (@MSEdgeDev) March 19, 2020

Microsoft has also published a complete design doc about the feature so you can check it out if you need more information. Moreover, the company also has a bug filed with the Chromium team which should bring the feature to other browsers as well. For now, Google Chrome (Stable) doesn’t support this feature but we expect Google to implement it once the feature has been approved by the Chromium team.

Via Techdows