Microsoft has already confirmed that it will base its new Edge browser on Chromium, the open-source project that also powers Google Chrome. After this announcement, Microsoft started contributing to Chromium which means the company’s efforts will make Chrome better, too.
A recent commit to Chromium’s Gerrit source code management by Microsoft revealed that Microsoft is adding a new feature to solve the scrolling issues in Chrome and other Chromium browsers.
There’s also a post by Microsoft engineer on Google products forum to detail the functionality of smooth scrolling.
“This proposal is to move composited scrollbar scrolling to the impl thread so that even when the main thread is busy, users can continue to interact with and scroll using scrollbars,” Microsoft engineer explains.”By avoiding the main thread in Chromium as well, we believe we can bring the performance of scrollbar drags more in line with what we observe in EdgeHTML,” it further reads.
Google Chrome already has smooth scrolling feature and Microsoft might be planning to improve it further on Windows devices.
Although there are several flags with scrolling title in Chrome flags menu, those flags have nothing to do with what Microsoft plans to implement in Chromium. At the moment, you cannot enable and test the feature in any version of Chrome.
It’s also not known when Google will ship a Chrome update with scrolling improvements suggested by Microsoft, but it’ll probably happen sometime later this year.
Editor’s Note: This article was updated with better clarifications.
