Firefox 13 smooth scrolling changed?

[Agent007bond]

Hello! Just wanna rant a little.

Well I don't really care about what algorithm is used for smooth scrolling. I find smooth scrolling so annoying that one of the first things I do when setting up a new Firefox installation is turn it off. What really annoyed me when I updated to Firefox 13 is how the update disrespected my choice to have smooth scrolling off, and simply turned it back on without my consent. If the developers wanted to showcase the new smooth scrolling algorithm to those who don't use smooth scrolling, they ought to have done it through the "Welcome to Firefox - Hooray! Your Firefox is up to date." page.

I did see the "Smooth scrolling is now enabled by default" item in release notes. But it's ridiculous that the devs can program an update to change settings to new "defaults" without asking the user first - especially when the user had been using Firefox with old settings for a long time. Imagine I have set "When Firefox starts" to "Show my windows and tabs from last time" but one fine day an update arrives and the devs decided to force all installations updating to it to "default" to "Show my home page" (perhaps to showcase the new home page?).. and by some weird coincidence the session restore got screwed up. All my open tabs and windows - GONE!

PS: What's with the "Now that you've got Firefox 4" text in about:home? (version number wrong)

[ygoe]

Smooth scrolling in firefox 13 feels horrible here, especially on the .br site above (clearly visible around the Flash plugin which always moves ahead). Chrome does it perfectly, with a smooth scroll extension installed. Also, with the min/max time settings changed to 150 ms, the scrolling is faster, but the lag remains the same. It seems that Firefox is rendering pages slower with every new version. Chrome has a few drawbacks, but the clear advantage is its rendering speed and fluency. It feels a lot faster. This computer has a bad graphics card and I need to turn HWA off. I'll check it at home with a real graphics card again, but my expectations are low. Guess I need to say goodbye to smooth scrolling. Firefox is the browser with the best flexibility. Why can't I select the old smooth scrolling behaviour back?

[_Alexander]

Firefox has always rendered slowly - my primary reason for not using Firefox much. Maybe Firefox 16 will have some changes for this.

[ygoe]

@Hera, Is there something special planned for version 16 or is it just some unspecified hope?

[_Alexander]

@Hera, Is there something special planned for version 16 or is it just some unspecified hope?

Well there is [Bug 539356] Replace Invalidate() calls in reflow with display list analysis which may help
There is also some rendering speed improvements which are 1st Priority

Refer to about:snappy thread

[Zlip792]

Firefox 16 already got DHTML Reflow fix which will also improve performance. Sorry for being offtopic.

[KWierso]

Hello! Just wanna rant a little.

Well I don't really care about what algorithm is used for smooth scrolling. I find smooth scrolling so annoying that one of the first things I do when setting up a new Firefox installation is turn it off. What really annoyed me when I updated to Firefox 13 is how the update disrespected my choice to have smooth scrolling off, and simply turned it back on without my consent. If the developers wanted to showcase the new smooth scrolling algorithm to those who don't use smooth scrolling, they ought to have done it through the "Welcome to Firefox - Hooray! Your Firefox is up to date." page.

I did see the "Smooth scrolling is now enabled by default" item in release notes. But it's ridiculous that the devs can program an update to change settings to new "defaults" without asking the user first - especially when the user had been using Firefox with old settings for a long time. Imagine I have set "When Firefox starts" to "Show my windows and tabs from last time" but one fine day an update arrives and the devs decided to force all installations updating to it to "default" to "Show my home page" (perhaps to showcase the new home page?).. and by some weird coincidence the session restore got screwed up. All my open tabs and windows - GONE!

PS: What's with the "Now that you've got Firefox 4" text in about:home? (version number wrong)

Changes to defaults only take effect if the previous value was aleady the previous default. Smooth scrolling was previously disabled by default, so flipping the default in 13 to true would affect everyone who had it as false before the upgrade. (And if you had a user-set true in 12, it will become a default-set true in 13, meaning if smooth scrolling is disabled in the future, your setup will be changed to false.)

[mojo-chan]

Is there any way to improve the frame rate? Firefox 12 scrolled at 60 FPS for me, now it is more like 12. I had smooth scrolling enabled before and it was smooth, now it is more like "juddery scrolling".

[mojo-chan]

Oh, okay, don't worry, it is back to normal now... funny half hour after the update, no idea what the hell happened there.

[Anonymosity]

The smooth scroll seems fine to me. I think it is actually a bit better with the scroll buttons. The speed using them is now about the same as with the arrow keys. It was slower before. I hardly ever use the scroll ring on my trackball, but that works as well.

[Omega X]

Firefox 16 already got DHTML Reflow fix which will also improve performance. Sorry for being offtopic.

That's a different fix.

[Chaosas]

set

general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMaxMS
and
general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMinMS

to 150, and the Lag feeling will be gone.

Thanks, that does help. But is there a way to change these settings to make it scroll further down (or up) the page? With Firefox 13 it definitely feels I'm not moving down the page as much as before with the same amount of scrolling

[JayhawksRock]

you could play with these 4 prefs toolkit.scrollbox and see what you get

[Chris000001]

set

general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMaxMS
and
general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMinMS

to 150, and the Lag feeling will be gone.

Thanks, that does help. But is there a way to change these settings to make it scroll further down (or up) the page? With Firefox 13 it definitely feels I'm not moving down the page as much as before with the same amount of scrolling

Set
mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to false
and set
mousewheel.withnokey.numlines to the number of lines you want to scroll.

[aarste]

Firefox always had juddery scrolling, it's even worse when there are tabs in the background loading content whilst you're trying to scroll down the page you're currently on.

It's just more juddery in v13 for some reason now. Think it's affected my "Yet Another Smooth Scrolling" addon too.

When will we ever get 100% smooth scrolling? Especially with Autoscroll (button click on scrollwheel and drag mouse up or down) as there's a judder every 1 second exact. It's just inexcusable to get these performance issues on high-end systems.

There was a time when Firefox v2 was totally smooth, and that's saying something as I was on a dual core back then, combined with an old ATI Radeon 1950XT.