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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, but every time I see an article like this I load up Firefox and try it out to see how it has progressed. I inevitably stop using it, and this time I decided to introspect and see why. It turns out that it's mouse wheel scrolling doesn't feel as snappy as other browsers, and for some reason it bothers me a lot. I'm going to try changing the scroll wheel settings and see if I can stick with it.

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> It turns out that it's mouse wheel scrolling doesn't feel as snappy as other browsers

are you sure it's not because you have smooth-scroll enabled?

I am super-sensitive to smooth scrolling performance and am kind of obsessive about it. I use FF 100% of the time (unless testing something cross-browser) with an extension called "Yet Another Smooth Scrolling WE" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yass-we/

If you spend a bit of time exploring the extension's options you should be able to find a combination that hits your personal 'sweet spot'. I've also found that really dialing in consistent smooth scrolling performance can require optimizing other factors including: OS settings, mouse software driver settings (I use Logitech Options), video card options (VSync especially) and even monitor options (often disabling motion 'enhancement' modes) because the end result is only as good as the whole stack.

It can help to ensure your hardware has sufficient performance to maintain your desired scrolling performance even when multi-tasking and the browser loading website with a bunch of JS and assets, especially on laptops and wireless connections. UMatrix helps block a lot of these loads.

If you have intermittent variable results, another thing to check is other FF extensions. I run quite a few extensions to customize my experience and have run across a couple (unrelated to scrolling, screen or visual appearance) that make scrolling performance on some sites inconsistent during background page load, perhaps some rare interaction of threads. Fortunately, none of them were any of the popular ones or ones I find essential.

I don't think it's possible to achieve truly 'perfect' scrolling behavior 100% of the time on all sites yet, at least I haven't been able to on any desktop browser or hardware combo I've tried. Currently, I'm quite happy with my FF configuration as all the sites I visit regularly perform very well and >95% of one-off sites do also.

For a while now I've gone and forth between Firefox and Chrome (Chrome always felt more consistent to me, but I liked Firefox's privacy and security features), but recently I went all in on Firefox it and feels a lot nicer than it did even 6 months ago.

I don't know what changed, but I haven't looked back.

that's funny because in chrome i hate the scrolling because it doesn't have the middle mouse click autoscroll feature and all the "solutions" to fix that are janky webextensions.

Chrome has autoscroll here, on Windows.

What platform do you use?

mac os... they may have added it since i stopped using it. but i like firefox more for it not being google

Honestly I don’t notice any difference between FF and Chrome for scrolling. What do you mean it doesn’t feel as snappy?

I've noticed some sites affect scrolling somehow, either because they intercept it somehow, or you scroll over a text box or some other widget and the scrolling targets the box instead of the page.

I think if you can keep the mouse off the page and on the scrollbar at the side (I'm on mac) it scrolls more predicably.

I am more sensitive to scrolling than most.

Wheel scrolling is awful in all browsers. The way to scroll is to use middle mouse button and move the pointer.

Only doing this you can accurately judge scrolling performance. I don't want 'snappy'. I want smooth.

Exactly my story. Had this with my retina MBP from 2015 and couldn't understand how this is supposed to be usable.

Tried everything, even resetting the OS.

Have a new MPB since Monday, tried Firefox again, no issues at all.

You can make the behavior more like other browsers by setting (in about:config)

  general.smoothScroll.msdPhysics.enabled

to true (by double-clicking).

EDIT: Formatting.

I'm so glad these FF config options exist:

mousewheel.acceleration.start mousewheel.acceleration.factor

I have them set to 1 and 15.

Works with Thunderbird as well!

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