14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft announced in late 2018 that it would migrate from EdgeHTML to Chromium for Microsoft Edge browser, explaining that by becoming a contributor to this engine, the rest of the WWW would benefit from all its innovations.
And by the looks of things, Microsoft is very keen on delivering on this promise, and the company is now bringing a key feature of Edge to Chromium browsers, including Google Chrome.
Smooth scrolling, which was specifically developed for Microsoft Edge, is a feature proposed to Chromium, and as spotted by Thurrott, Google could bring it to all browsers that are based on this engine, including those running on Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android.
Experiments under way
“Scrollbar scrolling using the mouse happens on the main thread in Chromium,” Microsoft’s proposal explains. “If the main thread is busy, scrolling by clicking on the scrollbar will appear to be janky as the events keep getting queued up [and] wait for the main thread to free up,” Microsoft explains in a description of the feature proposed for adoption on Chromium.
“We observe on average scrollbar drags have [over double the] latency in Chromium as compared to EdgeHTML today, worse on particularly busy sites. We attribute this gap primarily to EdgeHTML’s feature for off-thread scrollbar drags. By avoiding the main thread in Chromium as well, we believe we can bring the performance of scrollbar drags more in line with what we observe in EdgeHTML.”
Right now, Microsoft is still experimenting with early implementations of the feature, and no ETA is available as to when it becomes available to users.
However, Canary builds of Google Chrome already come with an early version of the smooth scrolling, and the Chromium-based version of Microsoft Edge coming later this year is likely to feature it as well.