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Fractal Lab

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900 pointsyesbabyyes147 comments

Incredible.

In the 90s we had rendering software that took about 10 minutes to general a single 2D fractal. I loved playing with it.

When I went to university, as part of a course, we watched a video where someone had created animations by adjusting a single parameter of the (2D) fractal over time. They'd spent untold hours of processing time to generate the frames. It was magical because it helped to offer insights into how the parameters are tied to the shape of the structure. I seem to recall fractals that looked like they were slapping each other's hands.

This is the first time I've really seen fractal software in the last 10-15 years. At university we talked about how it would exist one day, but damn, that's just incredible to see.

You might like to try out Mandelbrot Maps. It allows real-time interactive exploration of the relationship between the Mandelbrot set and associated Julia sets. (There is a corresponding Julia set for each point on the Mandelbrot set, and some striking structural similarities.) Also, the images it produces are beautiful. :-)

Disclaimer: I wrote the original version for my MSc project 7 years ago. Future students added further improvements in later years, including notably creating two Android apps. All versions are free and open source software.

- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.ac.ed.inf.m... - Android app port, by Alasdair Corbett

- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.bunnies.fra... - Updated Android app (Fractal Maps), by Sky Welch

- http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/mandelbrot-maps/ - Original Mandelbrot Maps (Java applet), by me

- Wadler's blog: http://wadler.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/fractal-maps.html | http://wadler.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/mandelbrot-and-julia-su... | http://wadler.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/mandelbrot-maps.html

In the 80's I wrote pascal code on my 8088 box to generate mandelbrots. Would leave it running overnight, and excitedly jump out of bed in the morning to see what it produced. Four colour CGA awesomeness. Impressed the teachers at school, they had no idea what to make of it. (Unfortunately no girl ever kissed me because of my teenage fractal prowess.)

My eyes are watering watching these new 3D creations.

Was it really necessary to implement your own scrollbar? It's absurdly slow (and therefore annoying) on Firefox/Conkeror, and seems entirely redundant when the browser handles scrolling perfectly fine.

Also, it seems to break swipe-left/right-to-nagivate-back/forward in Chrome and Safari. I was sure my touchpad was broken or something.

don't mess with the scroll bar!!

I have a weird issue in Chrome where setting the video volume causes the page to scroll down until only the lower half of the video was visible. I am unable to scroll back up and have to refresh the page.

Experiencing the same issue... But boy is that scroll bar pretty /s

I thought it was just broken for the scroll wheel on the mouse, and therefore if you had a fancy apple trackpad you could swipe easily and quickly through the content.

Exactly. I was about to post the same comment.

No advantages over the browser scrollbar, only some extra problems for the developer and the viewers.

I agree. All I saw was a "Blast! This video can’t be played with your current setup." message, and thought that was it. Up/down cursors and scrollwheel don't work. I just started clicking on elements randomly to see why on Earth this might have been upvoted. Eventually I somehow triggered the scrollbar to move down and saw that there was some text to read!

For those who, like me, couldn't see the video, you might have more luck via its Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/126664436

The ViewTube FF plugin worked for me.

Also the home and end buttons on the keyboard don't work.

I know I'm dating myself by posting this. Tom, the creator is associated with Kai Krause, creator of some cool graphics software a long time ago...

http://kai.subblue.com/en/contact.html

I've never heard of any of these people, but I have a strange impulse to buy some iOS app called Frax.

...Wait! No. No, I don't.

You should, I've played with it and it's quite amazing!

Edit: Here is one of the other creators talking about it a bit more: http://kai.subblue.com/en/frax.html

I think you missed my point.

I don't like advertising, and that whole website is a particularly nefarious form of it.

"Buy FRAX! Douglas Adams would have!" Oh, ffs.

What?

I had to go back and see if we were looking at the same website. I don't think we were.

When I looked at the interface in the video, I was thinking that it looked like the Kai tools from back in the day. Not just the visual look, but the philosophy of "exploring", rather than "creating".

Kai Krause, founder of the thinktank or incubator housed in an actual castle "Byteburg": http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burg_Rheineck

Oh wow! Sudden flashbacks of Kai's Power Tools plugin for Coral Draw...

I can't but help to think there might be some commercial potential here-- it looks incredibly fun to play with. Perhaps a free web-app where you can pay to have animations rendered at high resolution server-side and then placed in a Dropbox folder for download. Or something that makes music videos by using audio information to control some of the fractal parameters during an animation.

Perhaps you could seize the opportunity to train yourself not to look for a commercial value, or indeed, any value beyond it's inherent value.

To me it's obvious that this has value in itself; and frankly, I'm surprised you don't appreciate that.

What's wrong with looking for commercial value? This community is heavily focused on startups, after all. Is the inherent value of 3D fractal art that it looks cool? I don't think that's lost on anyone here.

It's not that it's wrong, I just felt eigenvalue was so quick to jump to that, you know? And as you say, it's a startup community and so on, and sometimes that seems a little... One-dimensional to me.

Part of it was actually probably my not-quite-conscious perception of eigenvalue's ideas as pretty unimaginative and lacking in potential. What about an immersive world where everything is a fractal and where all players can build new things? Everything is an algorithm with a few parameters and it's made real when you observe it. Now that's a billion dollar idea which might even be an estimation of the workings of the real world. :-)

But, truthfully, it was mostly just a play on words and GPs username.

That a person mentions a single dimension does not mean that they don't appreciate additional dimensions. Perhaps you could seize the opportunity to train yourself not to read too much into a few sentences? :)

You misunderstood me-- I think this is amazingly cool and has a ton of intrinsic value. I was only suggesting that in addition to this, there could be a possibility of making some kind of product that people would like enough to pay for. That would expose more people to creating advanced fractal art beyond a small circle of technologists.

You misunderstood me-- I think this is amazingly cool and has a ton of intrinsic value.

Cool! We're in agreement.

Here's my take: I think there always could be a possibility of making a product that (you could convince) people like enough to pay for. (Here in my country, people literally sell shit for money. Elk shit, to be exact. Apparently, many Germans want to have it in their homes.)

But let's say you come to this wonderful small gelateria in an Italian village. The ice cream is amazing. The setting is amazing. Your experience is breathtaking. Naturally, since we're all entrepreneurs here and all that jazz, you think "I wonder if there's not a commercial value in this". So you start making some kind of ice cream cones or whatever. You make advertising which creates a longing for that experience, that we all kind of know (perhaps even from my few faltering words) of Italian ice cream on a trattoria somewhere in Tuscany. You sell the ice cream to people.

Now, did you expose more people to that original gelateria? No, you didn't! You sold them on the idea, and they got some pretty boring ice cream to eat in their pretty boring home. And you got the money.

That's an approximation of what I'm afraid might happen if you succeeded in convincing the creator to "monetize". But it's ok, you won't do that; first off, he's not here and what's more he's obviously got enough talent to make whatever money he wants to, should he so decide.

Edit: In my original reply, I didn't mean "train". I rather meant "practice". It's a subtle but important difference and I see how it can shift the perception of my message quite a bit. Forgive me, I am not a native speaker.

Money changing hands doesn't depreciate the value of something.

Your gelateria analogy is flawed, because the gelateria is already a commercial enterprise, making gelato and selling it to customers.

A more apt analogy would be someone who - as a hobby - makes the best damn gelato on the planet...when he has the time.

I think what @eigenvalue was getting at was something like, "hey, I bet people would pay for your gelato, so you could turn this into something more than just a hobby."

You make an interesting point about the dangers of blindly "monetizing", but I don't think it's relevant to parent's comment for a few reasons (not the least of which that paying for software doesn't by itself reduce its utility, unlike the ice-cream + scenery example where the implicit scenery value is removed in the commercial "product").

Natural scenery doesn't cost money to make. Making profit off of it isn't intrinsically value-creating.

Software does take effort to make, and being comfortable finding ways to monetize it means more programmers can afford to create things like this. Not everyone has as enough free time to make all the things we want to pro bono. Many people have jobs (often for other people who did figure out how to monetize their own ideas).

So I'm all in favour of developers practicing asking/answering that question, because often finding the answer is what allows them to actually pursue those ideas. It's not wrong for people to sell the fruits of their labour—the world gets fruit that might not have existed otherwise.

This is by-and-large a community of entrepreneurs. We are trained to look for commercial value, and certainly see no benefit of training ourselves to the contrary.

Despite this, we can still appreciate this as art in and of itself. That doesn't mean it cannot be monetized.

I'd be interested to know if you can give a coherent account of what "value in itself" actually means.

Because from at least one interpretation - 'value in itself' means that it is not valued because it has a use in the production of something else which is valuable, but valued for its own sake. And on this definition it doesn't rule out having commercial value at all, since having commercial value simply means that people will pay money for it. It doesn't mean that they have to put it towards some other use.

Personally I find that I have to go to myself in these matters. So, a thing has value in itself if I find it valuable just as it is. Not in the sense "I want to own it", neither the sense of "I want to extract something other out of it", nor what you are alluding to, that it's useful for making something else.

So if I say "this is valuable", then nobody can remove that value by saying "no it's not", that just means, "I don't see value in it".

But none of this has anything to do with what eigenvalue said. With the subjective, immediate way of reasoning I am proposing, the way of spotting commercial value is saying "I want to pay money for this", which I also understand as your standpoint. But that's not what eigenvalue was saying, or rather that's not how I read it. To me it felt more like "I think this could be smartly packaged in a way that would make some other people pay money to somebody else", which I don't particularly like. Hence my reaction.

But again, mostly the wordplay which I found irresistible. :)

Oh okay - so you're talking about product which is intrinsically valuable to its creator, irrespective of it's potential intrinsic value to others. Seems reasonable... don't know if I agree with your larger thesis... but it is an interesting discussion. :)

Not only to it's creator but to anybody. I agree, I too find the entire discussion, if a little off-topic, very interesting.

3d printing

export to thingiverse.com

Ugh, just what we need, another "pro" fractal renderer. Just search around, you can find plenty of non-free 2D ones, and it's not so easy to find a decent free 2D fractal renderer that does anything interesting, at least not last time I looked. I think it's one of those markets where you consistently find a small handful of people that are willing to pay, and the result is a net loss for the world at large, because fractals are cool but largely useless, and it's enough work to build something like this that people are reticent to give it away for free. So no, I don't think there's any real commercial potential there.

Anything 3D printed - fractal lamp shades, art, curtains, etc.

I found this via @mrdoob on Twitter[1] and if he's impressed by this kind of stuff then, well... :-)

[1] https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/595297811656286208

If Mr Doob is impressed, drop everything and go look at it.

Impressive! The UI looks really user friendly and your video shows quite a nice panel of creative use cases, really keen on being able to play with that.

There aren't enough positive comments here. Damn this is so cool, technically rendering-wise, UX-wise, a great showcase... I love the video! Really hope the author releases the app, even if it isn't open sourced.

If anybody is interested in how this stuff works, I highly recommend looking at: http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/menger/menger.htm

and many of the fractal examples at shadertoy.com

Also, before reading that you might want to read and study the associated shadertoy example in:

http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfun...

which covers distance functions.

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY

(His voice is wonderful though, so maybe KEEP TALKING AND TAKE MY MONEY.)

I would pay $199 for this in a .app bundle instantly.

It's so refreshing to hear someone speak in a calm and understated tone for a change.

He's the modern version of Bob Ross.

It boggles my mind to think that this guy knows more about fractals than I could ever know there is to know about fractals. It's really interesting to me how people gain such deep knowledge of fields that I'll never scratch the surface of. Makes me wish I had more time.

He doesn't seem to know THAT much about fractals. Not more than you could pick up reading about them on weekends for a while.

Not only that but this is just his hobby.

More than both, he is playing with it.

You can create vivid unimaginable universes/superstructures with such detail just by changing some parameters. Planets, space stations, cities, forest, ocean, I can only say what else. The fractals I have seen in the video outnumber the unique sci-fi worlds in movies/games I have seen. I feel like a God who can create my own universe. Simply amazing. Just wow.

The speech in the video is hardly understandable (at least for me). Is there a transcript anywhere?

Edit: You seriously think a comment asking for a transcript because the voice seems hard to understand deserves being down voted?

It seems very clear to me. Perhaps there's a problem with your browser sound?

No, the narrator is definitely whispering.

I could easily understand him, but yes, the narrator sounds like he's almost falling asleep, or he is recording in a room with a sleeping baby and doesn't want to wake it. I assume your comment is receiving so much resistance because apparently a lot of people find his voice "soothing", and people don't realize that a soothing voice is not necessarily the best for communicating information.

But why - for everything good in this world - would they down-vote then?

I didn't down-vote, but I expect the comment comes across as antagonistic. Objectively, he isn't whispering. Whispering means sounds are not voiced, which is not the case here. So at best this is an exaggeration. Bluntly stated as it is, it likely seems unnecessarily negative in tone to some.

Tone is interpretation. I think we should prefer to error on the side of doubt before down-voting.

Let's assume they didn't down-vote because of interpreted tone but instead because they disagreed on the statement that the speaker whispered.

Why don't they put forth an perfectly good, objective criticism like you just did with

    Objectively, he isn't whispering. Whispering means sounds
    are not voiced, which is not the case here.

instead of down-voting?

I think down-voting should not be used for expressing disagreement.

Destructive behaviour is a good reason for down-voting.

Was his comment destructive? He used the word "whisper" non-conformant with the definition you brought. I don't think that was intentional and I think it was easy to get what he was trying to say. Other people also noted the "golf commentator voice". His behaviour was not destructive.

Down-voting is misused. I don't know how the community feels about this, but I see it as an issue.

Vimeo videos don't have automatic captioning, unfortunately. If you are finding it hard to hear there may be a problem with your speakers or your hearing. Or possibly your soundcard - check that you're not using some sort of equalizer that's supposed to 'optimize' things for music or so using EQ curves.

If everything else sounds fine and it's only this one video, then I'm not sure what to say. The speaker has a distinctive English accent and a somewhat nasal voice (so it has a somewhat narrow frequency range) but is perfectly understandable for me.

Everything else sounds fine. Its hard for me to understand him because of his accent, selectively fast speech and "somewhat nasal voice". After the beginning I could follow him but the first 30 seconds are hard for me.

Might be worth getting a hearing test. Perhaps you have selective hearing loss in that frequency range. (I'm sure there are more likely explanations, but couldn't hurt to check.)

While I agree with you that a hearing test is no the worst thing one can do, ironically, some parts were so loud that I had to remove my headphones.

That could actually support the same conclusion. It's a common misconception that hearing loss is general quieting across the board. What's more common is to have selective loss in some frequency ranges. That could encourage you to turn up the volume to ear those ranges better, which then might result in sounds in other range being uncomfortably loud.

Edit: more likely though is probably your speakers or something losing frequencies though!

Excuse the unintentional typo pun! And the missed 's' on 'ranges'. And the double 'though' in the edit. For the first two at least I can blame low batteries in my wireless keyboard...

Are you kidding? He is very well spoken. English is not my first language, and I had no problem understanding him.

Wonderful little demo, you can tell he's really explored the concept of fractal generation in great depth over the course of his development...it's incredible.

It's interesting how similar the stimulation I get from his voice is compared to the visuals I am seeing in his demo. Tingles, everywhere...

First off, awesome work. This is absolutely insane. Can't wait for the previews. I want to design my next game with all fractal art, and this might just be the golden tool.

First person to use this tool to find a BLIT wins!

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)

"Bob Ross - The Joy Of Fractals"

Wow this is really, really impressive. Every little detail of the app and the rendering is finely designed and well thought of. There are even god rays and camera aperture settings. I would love to try it!

The software looks awesome, the combination of your voice and the video was really soothing.

Oculus Rift plz?

So when can we try it for ourselves?

> Fractal Lab is my {NOT AZEIRAH'S} personal technical and creative canvas where I can explore ideas freely in my own time without obligations and support commitments, so for the moment it isn't available online or for local installation. I have some project ideas I first want to fully explore using Fractal Lab, after that I'll probably release the code.

This is on his site

soo... someday maybe

Failing that, his main page promotes the iOS app FRAX. Any opinions/experience about it?

Wow! The demo video[1] is really impressive. How are those effects created, I wonder? Do the fractals get their own depth maps? How do you arrive at algorithms that look so darn beautiful, especially those metal and plastic shaders? Is there prior art for this?

[1]: http://fract.al

I've played with it. Quite nice.

It's pretty awesome, real time fractals on your iPad, a lot to explore. Looks really great. Having parameters and textures animate while you're zooming on an iPad in real time on a fractal is impressive.

I paid the $4 and got it. Slick & entertaining. Not as hard-core math-ish as I'd like, but fun to zoom around in. There's in-app "pro upgrade", which I find a bit irritating if that's where the greater numeric control & deeper resolution resides.

I suppose it has 2D fractals only, my Haswell CPU struggles with 3D fractals already - I wish I had a experience as smooth as in fractal lab.

Google found this: http://hirnsohle.de/test/fractalLab/

Edit: Looks like an older version, but still pretty fun to play with

Thank you very much!

So, it's written by the same guy?

Yes, bottom of page has a link that redirects to http://sub.blue/

Oh great another site that ruins the OSX back gesture.

Those were some of the most unsatisfying swipes I can remember.

Doesn't work with my scroll wheel either

It also ruins scrolling for me. I have to click and drag the scrollbar.

Exploring these worlds via VR would be amazing. Exciting times ahead!

This is truly amazing. However, I can't help but wonder what the possible uses of this tool are (except for exploring fractals, and making fractal-art).

This tools makes inroads on GUIs for procedurally generating extraordinary physical complexity. Ask this again when we need design tools for molecular manufacturing (nanotech).

Not to mention, it's beautiful. Not everything needs to have a practical use.

I can't select text? Blah

Dude I expect you could easily sell that to movie studios or game studios to develop levels/scenes. 7:11 looks like the inside of an industrial building, or you could use it to develop organic looking assets, mystical scenery/mandalas, etc.

I reckon you could definitely commercialise this.

So how does one learn to draw fractals? Any good resources I should check out?

http://www.fractalforums.com/ could be a start

This site has some useful articles: http://hpdz.net/TechInfo.htm

Fractint was well respected software. It's very old but the source is available. I'm not sure what kind of licence the source is under - this was in the days when people called things "stone soup".

The math is going to be easily portable.

http://www.nahee.com/spanky/www/fractint/getting.html

great golf voice

This is absolutely amazing. I wonder what it takes to create something so brilliant single handedly, and that too as a hobby!

This is amazing.

The UI looks great, and of course the functionality is incredibly inspiring.

Really look forward to the day when I can play around with it !

this is one of the most impressive demos i've watched in a while. can't wait for it to go live!

I want to 3D print with this. yes!

This is awesome.

Simply wow.

Wow.

The author's voice makes me want to create some happy little fractal trees over here ... then some happy little fractal clouds over there ...

This is awesome. I want to play with this very badly.

On the topic of the voice and its effect, you may be interested in http://www.reddit.com/r/asmr

This is the first time I've heard about ASMR, thank you for the link, not sure if it's placebo, but watching this video was... interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erTe2wkxc-g

This article provides some context: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-whisper-then...

Strangely, the voice in the video makes me uncomfortable.

The lip smacking and semi-whispering is very annoying to me.

He is like the Bob Ross of fractals! Used to enjoy simply listening to the soothing voice of this PBS paint show host... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MghiBW3r65M

I paid $30 for Bob's mountain DVDs, ripped the audio, and use it to help me fall asleep at night. Worth every penny.

A soothing voice is just a great compliment for eye candy! Re: Bob Ross, I just have to share this: https://imgur.com/eIT3AnT

Yes, I was more impressed by his narrative capabilities than the 3d fractal rendering. Sometimes he was a little too whispery but most of the time he managed to convey information at a near perfect pace and pitch.

In case the creator is reading this, please don't break scrolling. This page scrolls impossibly slowly for me. (Firefox 37.0.2, OSX 10.10.3)

Drag to scroll

Scroll to scroll

I'm on a desktop. My mouse has a scrollwheel. My scrolling is perfectly fine on pretty much every other website. Why should I be expected to know to "drag to scroll" as if I'm doing all my web browsing on a smartphone emulator?

Drag is already assigned to an operation.

Also, please don't break the middle mouse button. I use it to open a bunch of new tabs when reading the text.

Note to author: I didn't bother to read the page because scrolling and navigating was horridly broken.

Do not hijack the scrollbar and/or mouse navigation.

Strange. I could scroll using the scrollbar or two-finger scroll-gestures on the trackpad (plus by dragging the text, which is unusual) and I'm using Chrome for OSX. What platform are you on that has this problem?

Windows and Linux.

Scroll is broken due to author. Did not read content due to scroll-hijack.

Guys, stop reinventing the wheel. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ Browsers already implement scrolling better than you (or any of us) ever can.

Hilarious ... and even that site resorts to Javascript.

And according to the mentioned site, it is impossible to have a website without google-analytics.

We reimplement Scroll because browsers like FireFox don't let you apply CSS for scroll bars, forcing you to have the OS's scrollbar branding (colors, style, etc..) in the middle of your page's branding.

The last thing you want to do with your brand is to have someone else take it over.

Understood but I think you got on the wrong side of the tradeoff. 99.999% of sites use the browser scrollbar and that should be a hint (check apple.com and tell me they don't care about branding.) Do you really want to be remembered as the site with a great tech demo AND a bad scrollbar? How can that be an improvement over just "a great tech demo"?

Furthermore I don't appreciate brands taking over my desktop and reducing the usability of my browser (and your site) but that could be just me.

Seriously? You think you can do a better job at implementing scrollbar than browser makers? And you have the resources to test on every_single_device out there? And you really think I would even notice the scrollbar if it worked?

Just don't.

Browsers also don't let you apply your branded CSS to my address bar, or to the clock in the corner of my screen, or to the plastic framing around my monitor.

Is that "taking over" your brand?

So you break scrolling for a very large number of users because it looks marginally prettier? That's, like, the literal opposite of proper software design.

Reality check: not a single user gives a damn about the pretty scrollbar. They care about being able to use the site. Breaking the latter in order to achieve the former does the precise opposite of what you intend: it weakens your brand because users associate it with broken websites.

This isn't to mention that a user might very well have a system scrollbar set for usability reasons (perhaps with a more-visible - whether better contrasted or simply bigger - slider due to poor vision, or an oversized slider due to poor motor skills), which means that your prioritization of "brand" over function is effectively giving the middle finger to people with disabilities. Nice going.

There will always be some element of the user experience you can't control. What about the shape of tabs, or the colour of the [X] to close the window? I think the scroll bar is in that category - it has nothing to do with branding and a browser scroll bar doesn't devalue any brand.

I just checked and perhaps the biggest brand in the world - Coca Cola - uses the bog-standard scrollbar. So if it doesn't ruin their brand, it is probably OK for you too.

Scrolling is completely broken. :/ (But this looks awesome!!)

It's using drag to scroll

Otherwise known as "broken".

It shouldn't, since the implementation breaks text selection and actual scrolling for desktop users.

Why are people downvoting this person for stating a fact?

Because it's a shitty excuse for deliberately breaking UX.

Because it's an indication that the designer believes he/she knows better than the OS programmers, the browser programmers, and the user when it comes to site ergonomics when said belief is demonstrably misguided.

Because it doesn't fix the problem.

You are not answering my question.

Why are people downvoting azeirah when azeirah isn't the designer of the site, and is not even advocating the design of the site?

I keep reading these comments on HN, but for me, I have never experienced a 'broken' scrolling effect. I browse using Chrome on OSX using: 1. my laptop touchpad and two-finger dragging, 2. the up/down arrow keys, 3. the spacebar, or 4. the scroll-wheel on my mouse. On my phone I use Android Chrome and scroll by dragging up and down. Anyway, I can't remember ever having these techniques not work.

Is there some other way of scrolling that I haven't thought of, and therefore am not using day-to-day, that breaks for other people, or do I just put up with it unconciously, switching between methods 1-4 automatically on the laptop, and never notice? Or, are people using iPads or iPhones, which I do not own, and they are more susceptible? Or Browsers-other-than-Chrome, which I guess must exist ;)

Genuinely curious!

I'm using Firefox on OSX. It scrolls extremely slow using a mousewheel. It also won't scroll when the mouse pointer is over the Vimeo embed (with the mousewheel or touchpad)

Also, the pageup and pagedown keys don't move the page. Also, the arrow keys don't move the page. Also, I can't seem to scroll by clicking on the scrollbar thumb and dragging it.

Very frustrating indeed on FF on a desktop.

Anything that modifies the native scrolling of a website can make a lot of trouble for some users, it's sometimes laggy, slow, or you simply can't scroll, it's a dangerous game.

Though we could discuss it all night long, in this particular case, people seem to be complaining about a chrome bug that doesn't let you scroll at all after you've done certain things ( can't really find steps to reproduce).

Which brings us again to the dangers of playing with scroll.

Chrome on OSX and chrome on android are quite the majority (and sometimes over represented on web-devs) so maybe that's why you don't see much issues.

This issue in particular happens to me with Chrome in Ubuntu.

Nothing in the DOM spec indicates that there are scroll bars or anything else about how the user is interacting with the scrolling position of the page. The window.scroll* functions talk about pixel or line dimensions, and not how the user's scrolling interface works or how the user interacts with that interface.

For example, some common methods are:

    * scrolling with a mouse by clicking on a traditional scrollbar
      (this is what is being reimplemented)
    * using a scroll wheel or trackpad drag
      (compatibility is *often* added for this, but not always)
    * dragging touchscreen    (support varies, getting better)
    * using the arrow keys    (sometimes supported)

..and a few of that almost always break when scrolling isn't left to the user agent:

    * PageUp/PageDn
    * some other key to page down, such as the space bar
    * a browser extension to auto-scroll the page slowly
    * accessibility tools of various types
    * no javascript support
    * the foot pedal I made out of MIDI keyboard sustain pedals and an
      old USB keyboard that is mapped to a non-standard X KeySym and
      bound as an alias to PageDn in firefox (it's Meta in emacs)
    * the scrolling UI for next year's Cool New Gadget that we cannot
      support because the device doesn't exist yet, but the manufacturers
      of the device can add support for standard HTML/DOM features

Also, even in the case where the UI method is guess correctly, the details may be different. For example, I set firefox's mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y to 500 so each scroll wheel click is a much larger movement of the page, because my mouse wheel is not a mouse wheel - I use thumb buttons for scrolling because the normal wheel was causing RSI problems.

The basic problem is a common misconception about what HTML, where the client (via their User Agent) controls the presentation. As they are in the hands of the users, there will always be a lot of variation as those users tailor their tools to their personal needs. The only way to maintain any particular presentation feature across all clients is to turn the WWW back into TV. The alternative is learning what can be specified by the page (pixel scroll position) and what is NOT in the spec (how the user and their User Agent interact), while remembering that any of these features may not be implemented the way you think they are.

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