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by kilowatt 5054 days ago
I'm with Gruber. The display is sexy. And good typography is beautiful on it. But my experience with Safari at the Apple Store was that the FPS when scrolling through pages is noticeably low. (Also choppy enough as to be frown-inducing were native apps I tested, like REAPER.) I know it seems like a strange thing to complain about (who cares what FPS a desktop app runs at?), but it's something you have to see and feel to judge the impact on your overall experience, IMO.

Lion inverted trackpad scrolling so that when you drag your two fingers down, the content follows them, like there is a physical connection between your hand and the page. On the Retina MBP, that illusion was mostly lost for me. I'm actually curious to know if owners of the Retina display get used to this chugginess, or if it's still kind of a big deal, even after awhile.

I know only a little bit about hardware composition in WebKit—and webpages are definitely not assembled "entirely" on the GPU. I suspect that there are gains to be made there, just in terms of how much work is being offloaded. Even if desktop Safari were to do what my old iPhone 3GS would do—separate the thread handling scrolling from the thread doing the painting, so that you could actually scroll ahead of where the renderer had filled in content, and see a checkerboard pattern—might be a better feeling alternative. Then again, this could already be happening. I haven't kept up with WebKit changes. Credit to Apple for pushing the boundaries. But I want my buttery smooth page renders, damnit.

/end entitled whining

2 comments

As of Safari 6 on Mountain Lion, scrolling is threaded and nonblocking on Mac, but it doesn't yet work for all pages. So yes, you can scroll ahead of what is painted. The most common exception is pages with fixed positioning.
Was it running Lion or ML? I recall some reviews mentioning that ML had specific optimisations to improve scrolling performance.
It was Lion. I'll revisit my impressions. It'd be nice to collect some hard data too...