I’ve narrowed down the scrolling dysfunction I’ve often mentioned as being a part of every Chromium-derived browser I’ve tried. Firefox is buttery smooth, truly a delight to use, on my laptops and my desktop alike. But any Chromium browser, whether Chromium itself, Vivaldi, Brave, Opera, or Chredge, has always stuttered and juddered like crazy on my two most-used laptops. I thought at first that it was just a characteristic of Chromium that it scrolled poorly, and Microsoft’s statement about Chrome’s scrolling being broken seemed to back that up. But when I tried Chredge for Linux, it had the same issue, just like the rest!
I did some more reading, and I saw some reports from Chrome users indicating similar problems with precision touchpads (from Windows users). I hadn’t considered that it could be related to the method of scrolling, but when I used a real mouse to scroll on Vivaldi, it was smooth and nice, without any hint of the shuddering and juddering I get with a touchpad.
Precision touchpads are a project led by Microsoft and Synaptics to bring a more Macbook-like touchpad experience to Windows. In short, a precision touchpad sends all of the touch data to the OS (over the i2c bus), and the OS decides how to interpret that and turn it into action. A discrete touchpad driver isn’t needed in Windows 8.1 or 10.
A non-precision touchpad handles all of that within the driver, then turns that into simulated mouse movements over an internal PS/2 port.
Perhaps, I thought, this was fixed some time ago on Windows, but it slipped by on Linux because of the low market share Linux has on the desktop.
I rebooted into Windows 10 on my Dell G3, then downloaded and installed Vivaldi. I tried scrolling with the touchpad, and what do you know, it was just as bad as in Linux. I tried Firefox, and it was just as good as Firefox in Linux.
Microsoft has had the precision touchpad option since Windows 8.1, but OEMs still had the option of using non-precision touchpads. MS has announced that eventually, all PCs that carry the “made for Windows 10” stamp of approval must have a precision touchpad. I don’t think that has come to pass yet, but both of my laptops purchased in the last ~3 years have them.
Obviously, Windows is the most commonly used OS for x86 PCs. Laptops are the most popular form factor for x86 PCs outside of servers, and Chrome is the most popular browser on Windows. So how can this stuttering, juddering scrolling still be a problem on precision touchpads, which have been on the market for 7 years?
With the rate that Firefox is removing important features, it seems like only a matter of time until Firefox ceases to meet my needs. It’s definitely headed in what I consider the wrong direction, and has been for the better part of a decade. Vivaldi is heading in the right direction, and more and more it seems like a move to Vivaldi as my main browser is in the near future. The thing that is holding me back is that horrible shuddering while scrolling.
It boggles the mind that the most popular browser in the world can still have this issue. There must be a lot of people out there using precision touchpads with Chromium-based browsers (Chrome included)! They must not have tried Firefox, because if they did, they’d have as hard a time going back as I am considering the move.
I had better keep it down about that, lest Mozilla decide to make their scrolling janky and bad because “that’s how Chrome does it,” as they have said so very many times.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
