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Google will FINALLY solve Chrome’s laggy scrolling issue by using a Microsoft-made solution

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Google has made many improvements to Chrome over the years to increase stability, add features and make it a much smoother experience, but one thing they have had trouble solving is the occasional lag and stutter you’ll get when strolling through a web page. No matter how many advancements they make in development and no matter how powerful your hardware is, it happens.

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But it seems they’re finally looking to make the one move that should rid us of that evil once and for all. The company recently confirmed that they will look to implement the Pointer Events API, which is an all-encompassing standard for mouse, touch and stylus input. Microsoft, with help from Mozilla, was the company that originally proposed this new standard to the W3C.

Pointer Events offers some technical advantages over the existing use of Touch Events and Mouse Events.  Most notably, pointer event listeners never block scrolling, and so replacing all touch event handlers with pointer event handlers will address the main longstanding source of scroll-start jank we see on Android (irrespective of whatever scheduler improvements we’re able to make to better prioritize input handling).

Google was hesitant at first, but after folks started to see the benefits of Pointer Events (smoother scrolling, more responsive link and button presses and other various improvements) in the latest versions of Internet Explorer they urged Google to ditch the old Touch Events method they currently use. The response was so overwhelming that they practically had no choice but to agree.

So when’s it coming? That’s one question Google can’t answer just yet. The company says there are still a lot of technical challenges, constraints and risks they have to solve before implementing the API, and as such they aren’t giving any sort of timeline.

Whether it be here within the next few months or three years from now, it’s in the works, and that’s all we know. We’re just happy to know that they’re considering it at all, and we hope it’ll finally solve one of the most frustrating problems that comes with using Chrome for Android.

[via The Verge]

Quentyn Kennemer
The "Google Phone" sounded too awesome to pass up, so I bought a G1. The rest is history. And yes, I know my name isn't Wilson.

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21 Comments

  1. How about chrome for Android it stutters too

  2. huh? theres zero lag when using chrome on my oneplus ART runtime

    1. Just wait for it, it’ll happen eventually. It tends to take place when you’re switching between others and Chrome frequently, seeming as though your hardware can’t keep up.

  3. *insert itshappening.gif* About freaking time!

  4. Good news. Chrome on my Nexus 5 freezes up a lot when scrolling pages. I actually see this more now in Lollipop than KitKat.

    1. i think the article was about the desktop version of Chrome. The mobile version is mostly decent.

  5. Hopefully they can use this to solve the stutter on my Chromebook which is even more pronounced.

    1. yeah mine stutters pretty horribly too….hope this is fixed

  6. Well windows lags on any hardware you run.. office , outlook takes 2 days to load then crashes every time you are working on any important doc or dev work. Its like Windows 95 never just lipstick on a pig

    1. Damn, kind of rig you working with? Never seen any of my Office stuff do that before.

      1. He must be trolling. Windows 7 boots for me in about 10 seconds or so, Office loads in a blink of an eye. I5 4690k at 3.9ghz, 8gb ram, and a Velociraptor HD. I can’t wait to eventually get a SSD.

        1. Yeah I’m really looking forward to seeing how different it will be to run my OS on SSD on my next rig.

    2. Even on 2gb of RAM and an outdated Atom processor, Windows boots from “off” in only a few seconds and office only takes a second or two to load, and on an i5 processor it absolutely flies. I think you’ve been at the Liberty Cap Gin again.

      1. Lol you have data to prove it..windows takes days to restart ..macosx its a different story may ur confused

        1. At least windows is a real operating system and can run games.

        2. I’ve got a Samsung 500T with a dual-core Intel Atom 1.8GHz, 2GB of RAM, and the world’s slowest eMMC memory. It boots from a dead stop in 48 seconds, and Microsoft Office takes about 15-22 seconds to load.

          My fiancee’s Macbook Pro was taking 10-12 minutes to reboot recently, though we figured out that the hard drive was bad so its back up to booting in less than a minute.

        3. LOL @ mac OS being faster. My gf’s 4 year old imac runs slower than my 10 year old laptop.

        4. Troll, and probable idiot to boot. Well you are obsessed with Mac and shiz-talking about another system that you don’t use, not to mention your terrible spelling and grammar, so there’s no “probable, purely and simply you’re an idiot and a troll. Bye.

        5. my windows 7 shuttle PC boots in less than 25 seconds. wtf are you talking about troll?

        6. My Yoga2 Pro has me at a login screen in about 5 seconds.

  7. About time google. Used Chrome regardless for long time but this needed to be address.
    As for the windows trolling.. Yeah, you have good hardware it boots and runs FAST! Couple SSD’s in Raid0 with 8+ gb of ram.. Nice quad to 8 core cpu and it’s ridiculous on the boot and load times!

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