#SMOOTHSCROLL CHROME EXTENSION INSTALL#
#SMOOTHSCROLL CHROME EXTENSION CODE#
#SMOOTHSCROLL CHROME EXTENSION WINDOWS#

There are other scroll-related goodies in the works that are also worth mentioning.

#SMOOTHSCROLL CHROME EXTENSION CODE#

The old, stepped scrolling behavior is going away, and scrolling will be smooth by default! No changes to your code are necessary, except maybe removing any smooth scrolling libraries if you’ve used them. In Chrome 49, the default scroll behavior will be changing Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS. Scrolling is a core interaction of the web, and altering it with libraries should be done with great care. They all too often trigger jank, get in the way of accessibility, and generally damage the user experience. These drawbacks are often also true of many libraries that deal with scroll behaviors, whether that’s parallax effects, or other scroll-coupled animations.

Having a library to do smooth scrolling is going to be something that has to be kept up-to-date and maintained, and it will add to the overall page weight of the site.

More maintenance for developers, more code for users to download.

That’s not necessarily a disaster, depending on what else the page is doing, but if there is some long-running work on the main thread, and scrolling has been coupled to the main thread, the net result can be stuttering scrolls and jank. As with any JavaScript added to the page, there will be an increased CPU load.

Increased propensity for main thread contention and jank.

So while the motion may be smooth it can feel wrong or uncanny. Secondly, the library’s smoothness physics won’t necessarily match those of the platform’s. This manifests itself in two ways: firstly, one site may have a smooth scroll behavior, but another may not, so the user can end up feeling disoriented by the inconsistency.

There are downsides to both libraries and extensions that change scrolling, though: Users also do this, too, through extensions.

#SMOOTHSCROLL CHROME EXTENSION INSTALL#

crx file (click to install) that should install okay on dev-channel Chrome.The solution to the stepped native, input-driven scroll behavior for many developers has been to use libraries, the goal of which being to remap it to something smoother and nicer on the eyes. js file and reload the extension or the whole browser. To hack on the animation yourself, it's okay to just edit the.

#SMOOTHSCROLL CHROME EXTENSION WINDOWS#

In the meantime, if you want to try this out, you can get on the Windows Dev channel of chrome here. It will be interesting to see if someone can make an extension that does this really well, or if it just gets baked into the native code first. An improvement would be to write to an array of upcoming frames at a fixed framerate, so opposing animations would be added first, and wouldn't fight things out in the window.Īnyway, this isn't a very finished solution, as many people have noted on Patrick's page, because some pages seem to steal the mousewheel binding, iframes and scrolling divs don't work, and it doesn't work for arrow keys or pageup/dn/home/end, just the mousewheel. The downside to this approach is that it can get jittery if you have two animations going opposite directions, and it also ratchets up the framerate as you The clever thing about Patrick's code is that it uses timeouts to overlap animations-overlapping in an additive way is a very important trick. Also, I re-parameterized his constants so you can set framerate, scroll speed, and scroll size in pixels, which makes it easier to tune the animation. I modified Patrick's code to use Sree's port of my pulse interpolator. Several people asked for a version that scrolls 'like Picasa', and since I wrote that I thought it would be fun to try. ExtensionsĪ cool guy named Patrick wrote a prototype of smooth scrolling using the unreleased Chrome extension system. One of the major feature requests for Google's Chrome browser is Smooth Scrolling.

Smoothscroll chrome extension