It's not actually all that smooth. Oh, I'm sure on a top-of-the-line M2 Macbook Pro, running Safari or Chrome, it's like butter. But on a slightly less capable (Core i5U, 24GB RAM) Thinkpad, running Firefox, I can hear the fans spin up and the scroll feels a bit laggy. Certainly not as smooth as scrolling a relatively static website, such as Hacker News.
i5-12400, Firefox here. Smooth as butter. No fans. Then again this is a desktop machine.
But I find these sites 100% unnecessary. Just put all your shit in the first section so I don't have to scroll. There's about half a screen of content surrounded in an ocean of bollocks.
The i5-12400 is actually a really fast CPU. Basically any desktop CPU released since AMD scared Intel into actually trying again is pretty fast, even the supposed low-mid range ones.
I agree (scrolling to "immerse the reader" is unnecessary, let your content speak), but it would be equally annoying to have a site about a new scrolling library refuse to use it.
That would be like all those news articles that talk about interesting would-be visual things without providing images.
I think people are mad because they disagree with the whole reason the library exists in the first place. Sure, obviously the site advertising the scrolling library should probably use the scrolling library. But it's still an awful idea and just shouldn't exist in the first place.
I haven't bothered to search yet, but I wonder if there's a browser extension that can completely disable the browser APIs for monitoring scroll position. If websites were simply unable to hijack my scrollbar, the web would be a better place.
2-finger swipe as in swiping left or right to navigate forward and back? Isn't that a hardware or OS function so it can be differentiated from opening/closing the notification center?
Or are browsers really monitoring for scroll left/scroll right inputs to infer two finger swipe?
This website is pretty much unusable for me on Firefox (Ubuntu 22.04). I'm also running a GPU-wise, fairly heavy game in the background currently, which I'm sure is attempting to draw frames even though it has been minimized. Likely competes for the same resource this website is trying to use, but gets priority and the website just barely, if it all, responds to my scrolling.
In fact, the experience was so viscerally annoying, it incited me to write a comment about it on HN.
Reminds me of the 90's cringe trend of having gifs and audio and crap everywhere.. But at least those still had some html and could potentially be semantic.
This modern cringe trend seems to have abandoned any hope of semantic web + all of the original ideas behind it.
Me too, I don't care how performant or consistent it is, it still feels clunky to me. If I'm reading primarily text content just give me a regular article format with a regular scrollbar. If your content needs fancy animations and transitions and stuff you should be making a video.
The main thing I hate about all of these is how low the information density is. I like to scan over dense text to see if I'm interested, but all of these try to force feed you information bit by bit at the speed they think is right for you.
"Ballcock" is the plumbing term for that thing in your toilet tank that regulates the water flow.
That doesn't mean I'd call my new library "Ballcock", though.
That said, I'm going to go against the grain here and say that this really does appear to be quite nice for its niche. While I wouldn't use it on a generic web site, I could see someone using it to make an excellent art gallery or game or something of that nature.
Developer: don't get discouraged by all the hate you're seeing here. You clearly spent a lot of time on this, and if it works for your purposes, and those of others, great!
Clicked because I’m in the market for a new razor, stayed for a well-designed and surprisingly passionate presentation about scroll management on websites (UI scrolls, not magic ones)
HN probably wasn't ever going to like this, for good reasons.
For someone trying to make something artsy, this probably solves a lot of problems common with this form of scroll-linked animation. I don't see an issue with that! It sure is nice looking, at least on my machine. (FF 107, 2019 MBP)
But please never use this on anything I'm expected to actually read.
The scrolling lags on my 2020 M1 MacBook Air. It's smooth as butter, but when it takes a few hundred milliseconds to start moving I don't feel in the slightest like I "forget I'm navigating a web page" - more like I'm driving an ICE car where the engine lags the pedal enough that I have to compensate for it.
It feels a little like we're going back to 2005-era deviantart "trendwhore" style design. Big text, numbers with leading zeroes (01, 02, etc.) for some reason, lots of line art, artificially shaded 3D stuff. I don't mind it. No pixel font typography, though -- certainly not with today's high res displays.
I think there's a lot of hate in the comments, and while I agree (stop hijacking my scrollbar), I'd like to inject some constructive positivity:
1. They put the disclaimer right in their motto. Get smooth or die trying. They're willing to accept failure in pursuit of peak smoothness.
2. Hate it as much as you want, ever since the awful idea was born, we haven't been able to prevent websites from doing this. Some implementations are better than others, and having standardization will help improve the state of the web for all websites that make this... terrible... decision. Their implementation happens to be quite nice.
3. Even if there's issues with the implementation, having a standard library means that when updates get applied, they apply to all websites that use them.
I actually quite like this implementation of smoothness except for two things.
The max speed is way too low. None of the scrolling momentum is kept and it takes forever to get anywhere on the page.
Please, lets stop using the scroll bar as a loading bar. When I scroll down, I want to go down the page. Just slowly bring up page by page that get placed somewhere randomly on the screen space.
I went on the website and thought: "Wow, this is great. I really like. Maybe I could use it for my next project." Then I came to the HN comment section, read only negative comments and now I do not want to use it anymore. Sad saturated world.
Don't let HNers dictate what you use, this is a very special audience and the overlap with the vast majority of the population is very small. Don't get me wrong, I hate these smooth-scrolling things and I wish Google would penalize it, but it won't matter to the majority of people, and they might actually find it neat.
If your project isn't targeting this very niche audience, include it. Add a cat that chases the cursor. Have a loading animation that assembles the site from blocks. Be bold and brave and enjoy yourself.
In fact, your site probably doesn’t need JavaScript at all. Everything since the late 90s has been a step in the wrong direction.