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Comment by mmh0000 | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely hate smooth-scrolling. It's one of the first things that I disable. I can't stand the way smooth-scrolling "feels,"... "mushy," and "laggy" are the best words I can think of to describe it.

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On Linux? Do you hate it on macOS as well?

I’ve used Macs for a number of years - and on macOS, mouse scroll events have been very “precise” for a long time - sending scroll events in fractions of a line. Scroll isn’t a button. It’s an axis. It feels great - because you have direct, continuous control.

I moved to Linux mint a couple years ago and tried to bring my Apple magic touchpad with me. (I prefer it over a mouse while coding.) Linux has APIs which return precise scroll offsets, but a lot of apps don’t use them. Instead, Firefox will wait until I’ve scrolled an entire line worth, then emulate a smooth scrolling event to “catch up” to the scrolling I’ve already done. It feels horrible. Mushy and laggy are the right words. IntelliJ has the same problem - I assume precise scroll events don’t survive whatever event library they’re using. I’ve given up and gone back to a mouse on Linux. And turned smooth scrolling off.

Smooth scrolling is a great idea - but for my money it’s only worth it if you have direct, continuous control over the scrolling position. And unfortunately on Linux (and probably windows) that’s held back by bad software support.

Maybe it's just what you're used to - having got a Mac for the "premium experience", I found it sluggish and slow (albeit compared to a stripped down X11 system, rather than a full-on compositor experience)

I seem to recall smooth scrolling on the Mac having the same basic issue as elsewhere. It takes an instantaneous scroll input and turns it into an animation. Scrolling half lines is fine and all, but I want the scroll position to jump to where it's going; possibly with multiple jumps if my input is over several frames.

With what input device? Macos cant make a clicky mouse wheel smooth.

Mostly, I scroll with a keyboard, but sometimes a scroll wheel yeah. Not a fan of trackpads.

But turning off smooth scrolling made scrolling with those other devices feel better (to me), as I recall.

Yeah that makes sense to me. Keyboards and scroll wheels don’t have the precise control that trackpads (and Apple’s Magic Mouse) have. Clicky scroll wheels aren’t magically better on macOS. It’s the continuous, precise scrolling experience of a good trackpad that fixes it. Apple nailed it if you use their hardware and software.

I pretty much agree with OP, but i could see an argument for smooth scrolling with precise mouse scroll events. But:

1) Most mouse scroll wheels feels discrete / have low resolution, so they behave more like discrete press. With my current mouse, each wheel up/down event does scrolling of several (~5) lines.

2) There is scrolling from keyboard (up / down / page-up / page-down), which are definitely discrete events, so any smooth scrolling from that is laggy.

I personally hate anything that adds unnecessary latency, that's why I disable smooth scrolling and desktop effects. I even have a CSS hack to disable all transitions, animations and fades on the Web. It makes everything instantaneous, which I really like. I also use plain X11 without a compositor, so I have a super low latency desktop that feels really fast.

Totally with you; first thing on a new system is hit the "accessibilty" settings to disable features/improve latency.

There's also the pointless visual distractions (e.g. firefox blue flash) even after killing web page animations,

I eliminated Firefox animations with a custom userChrome.css file. They are all gone.

Snap. You nixed the blue flash too?

  /*  No blue swipe on tabs when loaded */
  .tabbrowser-tab .tab-loading-burst {
    display: none !important;
  }

Can't find the original reference, looks like plenty of others though, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/11js1cuprevent_...

Blue flash completely destroyed, I confirm it.

This is my userChrome.css (I also have a megabar remover in there, that's not shown here):

* {

    transition-delay: 0ms !important;

    /* This is the magic to kill it 100% */
    transition-timing-function: steps(1, jump-start) !important;

    /* Animation Killer */
    animation-delay: 0ms !important;
    animation-duration: 0ms !important;
    animation-iteration-count: 1 !important;
    animation-timing-function: steps(1, jump-start) !important;

}

Also I have ui.PrefersReducedMotion=1 set in about:config.

Same, I react viscerally when an app implements smooth scrolling. Fixed increments is an absolute must. It’s interesting how different people can be.

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