Wait, you think Chrome's scrolling is better?
It's not as horrible as it was at launch; I'll give it that, but it still just feels wrong compared to Firefox's.
It's not as horrible as it was at launch; I'll give it that, but it still just feels wrong compared to Firefox's.
That's the most detrimental effect of Chrome's scroll I think: it makes designers want to look for alternatives to scrolling websites, and unfortunately for all of us, these "gorgeous" but completely user-hostile alternatives exist. And good luck if you get on such a website with js disabled if it wasn't coded in a gracefully degradable way...
No, that is just designer's dumbness. Scrolling should be a system setting and browsers should not override it but just read and use it (I am looking at you, Firefox). And websites certainly should not override it with at all.
Thing are more consistent on Mac OS, but on Windows and Linux these kinds of GUI functionality are still at the "wild west" level, so the only sensible choice is to implement what's "better looking for the user" in your application, which all browsers except Chrome seem to do, btw, and they've arrived at a convergent result while doing it...
And "designer dumbness" is real, but it's root cause is in the fact that lots of good graphic designers are "control freaks", and when they know that something is "technically possible", they don't care how much work it takes, and it takes them a lot to "grok" how detrimental the overall result is for UX.
I solved the problem for myself by staying as far away as possible from "design-driven development" or teams led by designers... but it is a fact that such teams exist at lots of small agencies and startups and that they do shape the field, unfortunately.
Smooth scrolling is nicer than jumping in my opinion, but firefox gives an option for the latter if people want it.