In a new proposal, Microsoft has shared a solution to improve Chromium’s touchpad-based scrolling. Microsoft wants to bring Windows 10’s touch-initiated fling animation to fix the slow movements when scrolling using two-fingers touchpad gesture.
The bug post ‘Fling curve on Windows should match Edge and other native apps’ was filed by a user in 2016 and it has been recently assigned to a Microsoft engineer. According to the bug post, scrolling with touchpad’s two figures gesture is slow and flick scroll gestures end almost immediately rather than inertial as expected.
In a work-in-progress commit, Microsoft says adding support for Win specific touch-initiated fling animation could improve this behaviour. The commit hasn’t been merged or reviewed yet.
According to the commit, this change will enable Chromium on Windows to have a touch fling inertia that behaves more like Edge and other native apps.
“Note that this implementation does not modify the curve depending on the scroller’s size, something that may be desired. User feedback will be used to determine the importance of bringing that behavior to Chromium,” the commit reads.
In another commit, Microsoft has shared the following technical details:
For fling and inertial scroll, the animation used by EdgeHTML matches Windows and Microsoft design. This differs from the animation built into Chromium by default. This CL will add an option to use Microsoft fling animation curve for touch-initiated flings rather than current default fling animation.
One thing to note is that this fling curve is the same for subscrollers vs root scrollers which is different than what EdgeHTML had. We’re planning on running some user studies to see if that’s an important thing to bring over or not.