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by nounaut 3383 days ago
May I please take this opportunity to ask everyone to never ever consider forcing smooth scrolling upon the visitors of their websites.

Smooth scrolling is enabled by default in browsers and as a user I've therefor actively opted out of that behaviour because I genuinely dislike it and feel that it destroys my user experience. By forcing that experience on me I will have the same feelings towards your website.

3 comments

This has nothing to do with that though. This is "smooth scrolling" as in animating the transition to the anchor point, compared to just jumping straight to it.
What sucks is that every smooth-scroll implementation is just another copy of "the most popular one" - a simple S-curve, where it accelerates up to a point and then begins to slow down at the midpoint. If they were implemented with a 1/x curve, you'd get the immediate response from input, without that "slow and drunk" feel typical smooth scrolling delivers, in addition to a smooth animation.
On linux (Xubuntu 16.04/ATI card) smooth scrolling in both Firefox and Chrome causes horrible tearing even with sync to vblank on, The first thing I do on both is disable it and then increase the number of lines scrolled in FF, it's a much better experience then.

    mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount set to 30 (you might need to play with it)
generally works much better.
Oh! I've been trying to pin down the cause of this for a while, I'm glad you mentioned this, thank you.
If you use Chrome with the open ATI driver if you go in chrome:/flags you can force it to enable hardware acceleration via " Override software rendering list" even if it's not on the (very cautious) whitelist.

To even get to chrome://flags I have to (on first run) do google-chrome --disable-gpu then change the flag then restart.

After that everything works flawlessly, it took me a while to track that one down!.