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Comment by KhalilK | Hacker News Reader

Meta note: That is one of the smoothest and pleasant scrolling experiences I've had on the web! Kudos to the web devs!

We've spent a lot of time optimizing for 60fps for the Web, it's not quite there yet for all browsers, due to different rendering/layout engine "gotchas", but we're working on rock solid 60fps everywhere.

Is that why Inbox requires Chrome?

Yes.

I found it disruptive and inconsistent. First of all, it disables the scrollbar and Page Up/Page Down, so I had to resort to the arrow keys. Sometimes scrolling moves the screen, sometimes it activates an animation. I found myself repeatedly blowing past sections because I was trying to scroll enough to bypass the content currently on the screen.

There wasn't anything about the experience that wouldn't have been as well served by a normal scrolling page with animations activated by a click.

It's funny, because for me the scrolling on their page (https://www.google.com/inbox/) doesn't work at all, on Safari 8.0/OSX.

I just tried it on Yosemite/Safari 8 and it seems to work for me.

It works for me, and doesn't obviously glitch in the sense of dropping frames, but it feels wrong. The animations all start really slow, and the curves are way off the curves of OS-native features that do a page-at-a-time swipe. Also, if you continuous scroll with the trackpad and backtrack your fingers even a little, it jumps back a section. Still, I am not sure it is easy to fix these issues given what the web platform offers today, and kudos for not blatantly dropping frames.

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