If you're changing the scroll direction, you're not moving, you're trying to recreate your MacOS experience on Windows, and it isn't surprising that didn't go well.
But it was a feature limited to their own devices, and was set via a special Trackpad Settings app that you had to download from the Windows Store, not a standard part of the OS.
Which is a pretty good example of why I don't use Windows much anymore.
On a phone, you drag the page so when your finger moves up, you are scrolling down. MacOS has had this be the standard for a long time.
Changing the direction makes touch scroll act like you're click-dragging on a scroll bar. when your finger moves down, you scroll down.
Before 10.7, the scroll behavior acts like you've grabbed the scroll bar and your fingers drag it, so moving your fingers down makes the scroll grip move down and the page content move up. Moving your fingers left makes the scroll grip move left and the page content move right. The scrolling paradigm is that your fingers grab the viewport and move it with respect to the content.
In 10.7 and later, it instead acts as though your fingers are grabbing the content and moving it around within a stationary viewport. So moving your fingers up pushes the content upward. So the scroll interaction is like the direct interaction on a touchscreen, but via a trackpad instead.
That's been their default since back in 2011, and although a lot of people disabled it at the time I definitely prefer this mode of scroll interaction. It's more direct and is consistent across all the gadgets I use.
It acts like you're grabbing the content and moving it around, rather than grabbing a scroll indicator at the side of the page and pushing that up or down. Especially when you factor in other gestures like pinch to zoom with multitouch trackpads, it now very weird to turn this off. For zoom, it feels like you're grabbing the content, but then when you pan suddenly you're grabbing the viewport instead? Next time you're on a Mac, open up Maps and try it both ways.
The fact that grabbing content this way feels natural may have a bit to do with Apple having large, smooth, and very responsive trackpads. YMMV on other hardware.
I don’t ever touch laptop screen even if it is touch enabled. To me mouse is strictly superior to touchpad which is superior to touchscreen and keyboard - outside of operations that require precise positioning on the surface of the screen - is superior to pretty much everything.
I thought about why I prefer things this way and decided that it is about travel time. With a touch screen if you want to love from a to b your finger has to travel all the way, whereas mouse can be tuned for maximal sensitivity. And for operations where you can use a keyboard shortcut the interaction time is even more immediate.
Once upon a time I had an 8 button mouse with several of the buttons bound to Exposé functions, but I don't think I'd go back to that from Apple's trackpads.
The problem is that a touchpad is still fundamentally an indirect pointing device, rather than a direct pointing device like a touchscreen. The "consistency" argument relies on the same flawed reasoning that led Microsoft so astray with their Windows 8/Metro UI efforts to unify touchscreen and desktop interfaces.
And ergonomically, it's easier to perform a down scroll on a touchpad with the non-"natural" scroll direction, because your fingers have more room to curl further than to straighten out when they're resting normally on the trackpad.
Based on what? I don't think there's any logical advantage to each of these options although I prefer the Mac-way now. You just get used to it.
As a counterpoint, cursor movement with a trackpad is just as indirect, yet we make the cursor move around directly with your finger.
Why not make the cursor act like traditional scrolling? Treat the cursor like the contents of a scrollable view, and your finger motion acts like it's moving the viewport relative to the contents even though the cursor/page is actually moving while the screen/viewport is stationary?
That sounds super weird, yeah?
Having flipped my mental model to "one finger drags the cursor, two fingers drags the content", going back to "one finger drags the cursor, two fingers drags the viewport relative to the content" sounds similarly strange.
>And ergonomically, it's easier to perform a down scroll on a touchpad with the non-"natural" scroll direction, because your fingers have more room to curl further than to straighten out when they're resting normally on the trackpad.
Not really an issue; scrolling has momentum and requires very little movement. Give it a push and then put your fingers back down to stop it, it's not like a clicky mouse wheel where you have to scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll to go more than a few lines at a time.