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by ponyous 4008 days ago
How much does Project Silk improves scrolling performance? Can you "feel" it?

Scrolling/motion performance is the only thing that is keeping me away from FF at the moment - Even dev tools are getting amazingly good.

7 comments

I'm on ff 40 (developer edition), so presumably I've been running project silk for a while now, and for me the scrolling is visually indistinguishable from chrome. The difference is in the inertia: chrome slows to a halt marginally more smoothly, and it does that thing where you can elastically scroll past the end of the page.

The increased smoothness of the inertial model probably indicates that chrome's scrolling is actually better, repaints more closely aligned to vsync or whatever, but like I say there are no actual artifacts, tearing etc. visible on my macbook retina. If you've got a top of the line 120fps gaming monitor its probably more noticeable.

That fancy lcd-testing website probably has some way of measuring it.

For me the big issue is the lack of visual feedback when swiping left and right to go back and forward. In chrome/safari you get a big sliding animation to tell you you're triggering the gesture correctly. In FF you just get an arrow after the gesture has been triggered, when its just annoying visual clutter. This means it still sometimes takes me multiple attempts to hit it, because I don't have that feedback during the gesture to cement the muscle memory.

EDIT: apparently chrome gives you the arrow, ff gives you absolutely nothing.

For what it's worth, I've just updated on OS X and scrolling feels just as janky as ever.
Maybe that's because OS X makes the scroll wheel consider acceleration (move the scroll wheel quickly, you scroll more, move it slowly, you scroll less), unlike Windows/Linux?
Same here. But I'll keep using Firefox because I cant stand what Chrome is doing with my cpu/memory/privacy and I want to keep Safari (the less 'usable' browser) for work related stuff and Firefox for personal ones, on another desktop space.
Two firefox profiles? One for work and one for personal?

Type "man firefox" into your terminal and you will see the relevant options and can set up aliases and shortcuts appropriate for your separated browsing needs.

There are some Firefox add-ons that let you run multiple profiles in separate windows.
Firefox does this out of the box without any addons.
I noticed a huge difference with this site: http://www.2ality.com/2015/02/es6-classes-final.html

In the previous Firefox version scrolling on that site was laggy to the point of being unusuable for some reason.

Definitely an improvement for me. Smooth inertial scrolling on trackpad has been the reason why I still use Safari on OS X.
I can't feel any difference between Chrome and Firefox when scrolling, but http://www.vsynctester.com/ is jankier on Firefox on my old-ish Macbook Air.
I can't wait to write it tonight! This is one missing thing on OSX.
It's OSX only for now.