Let me first tell you, why smooth scrolling is a good idea and not just about fancy animations. Scrolling a website in a smooth manner is easier on the eyes and it enhances readability. That's probably the best thing about it. However, it's not easy to get it right, because there are a lot of parameters to account for. If the scrolling experience is too sluggish or the acceleration, momentum or flux-capaciting is just a bit off, it can feel unresponsive very quickly. And that's a real source of frustration, because I like everything to be fast and efficient and reduced to its core.
But, what I really hoped for was, that I could finally get rid of 3rd party addons like Chromium Wheel Smooth Scroller. Don't get me wrong, it's a great addon and you can fine-tune the hell out of all the parameters, but it's still a 3rd party addon and that's always something to which I only resort in times of desperation.
Now where's the catch? This post obviously wouldn't exist without one, you think. Let me enlighten you: When Chrome 49 was released, the first thing I did (before updating) was to uninstall my scrolling addon. Having done that, I immediately updated to version 49, fired up my favorite IT news page and scrolled away... already half-expecting it to fail (the feeling I always have when I try out new features.) As half-expected, I was presented with the old "jaggy" scroll experience they introduced in Windows 2.0. "What's wrong with this? Why doesn't it WORKED?"
The revelation came when I did some more googling on the topic and I came across a thread on the chromium bug tracker. Someone thought, it would be a great idea if Chrome respected the Windows system setting called "Animate controls and elements inside windows". Of course, it's not, but more on that later. For those of you, that don't know about this setting, here's an ugly screenshot:
This is one very very old system setting, that has been carried over from older versions of Windows and it was first established when our star system formed. And here's how you find it on Windows 7: Since it's a totally advanced setting, being very advanced and all, because it's about the system (in a advanced way) you'll find it in the Control Panel under System -> Advanced system settings -> Advanced tab -> Settings (under Performance) -> Visual Effects tab. You'll have to enable it for Chrome to show off its new scrolling tricks.
Of course, this specific setting is disabled on my machine and that's because I despise animations that have no real use. In fact, I despise all graphical effects that divert my attention from my important work, because they only slow me down and that's something I don't like. There's a big difference in animation that's just there for the looks and animation that has a purpose or enhances the user-experience. Someone already pointed that out on the bug tracker, but the reply from supposedly one of the developers was:
We want to avoid settings in Chrome at all costs. While there are a few users who might want to enable animations in Chrome but disable them in the rest of Windows, that use case is narrow enough not to outweigh the costs of adding a setting/flag for this.
Googel pls : Why respect a setting in Windows that is burried under a pile of dialogs from the middle ages? Generic window animations are useless, smooth scrolling is not. Chrome doesn't WORKED! (at least not as expected)
What's also worthy to note is that smooth scrolling was already implemented and working in Chrome on Windows (as a beta setting accessible through chrome://flags), but has ceased to work since Chrome 34 or something around that, so they're actually only bringing it back by fixing it, but that's a different story.
More on the topic:
No comments:
Post a Comment