Microsoft has already confirmed that it will base its new Edge browser on Chromium, the open-source project that also powers Google Chrome. After this announcement, Microsoft started contributing to Chromium which means the company’s efforts will make Chrome better, too.
A
recent commit to Chromium’s Gerrit source code management by Microsoft revealed that Microsoft is adding a new feature to solve the scrolling issues in Chrome. The flag titled ‘Smooth Scrolling’ is now live in Chrome Canary and it allows webpages to animate smoothly when scrolling page content.
You can test this feature in Chrome Canary by searching for ‘Smooth Scrolling’ in flags menu. After enabling smooth scrolling, you may notice improvements when scrolling heavy web pages in Chrome.
As per the flag, the feature will work on Windows and other platforms. There’s also a
post by Microsoft engineer on Google products forum to detail the functionality of smooth scrolling.
“This proposal is to move composited scrollbar scrolling to the impl thread so that even when the main thread is busy, users can continue to interact with and scroll using scrollbars,” Microsoft engineer explains. “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,” it further reads.
It’s not known when Google will ship a Chrome update with smooth scrolling, but it’ll probably happen by mid-2019. For now, you can enable and use it in Chrome Canary.
source
