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Do you suffer from the shame of 'Scroll Jank'? Help is at your fingertips

Microsoft updates pointer events for Precision Touch Pads to make scrolling great again

Microsoft says it will fix "scroll jank" because Edge needs it and Chrome sorted it ages ago.

The Register had not heard of it until Microsoft posted news of a fix coming to its Edge browser.

A little searching later and we learnt that scroll jank is when a computer can't keep pace with a user scrolling down a web page. Users scroll or swipe, but the page stutters or jumps.

There's a detailed explanation in the video below.

Youtube Video

On Thursday, Microsoft's program manager for Edge, Scott Low, wrote that jank has generated a year-old-and-much-complained-about issue in Edge known as "Edge does not fire wheel events when scrolling using the 2-finger scroll gesture on a Precision Touchpad".

So Microsoft is fixing it. Edge 17 will adopt a technology called Precision Touch Pad (PTP) Pointer Events and will "fire Pointer Events with a pointerType of 'touch' in response to PTP gestures".

"While this is a departure from the mousewheel events of the past," Low wrote, "we believe that the advantages to this approach more than justify the departure."

Chrome has done similar things since version 51, so Microsoft isn't ahead of the pack here. But it is making sure that Windows 10, its preferred hardware, and web properties like Bing Maps emerge as jank-free as possible. It'll also jinx jank on sites run by other companies.

For developers who have built older versions of Pointer Events into their sites, no change should be necessary. ®

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