Building a great touchpad experience for the web with Pointer Events

Most web pages don’t fit on one screen Microsoft Customer Service, so good scrolling behavior is an integral part of a good web browser Support.Microsoft.Com/Help. It’s so crucial How To Get Help in Windows 10 Keyboard  to the user experience that we have spent a lot of time optimizing page scrolling uninstall microsoft edge, with great results.

Since launching Microsoft Edge, we’ve optimized most scrolling experiences — scrolling via touchscreens, page and content scrollbars. One particular focus in previous releases has been improving touchpads, specifically precision touchpads (PTPs), to provide a Microsoft Support Phone Number smooth, fluid, intuitive experience by default.

In this post, we’re introducing a new Microsoft Customer Service optimization coming in EdgeHTML 17 to allow developers to customize How To Get Help in Windows 10 Keyboard  scrolling Support.Microsoft.Com/Help behaviors and gestures with Precision Touch Pads, without impacting scrolling performance: PTP Pointer Events.

Background

Precision touchpads are high-end touchpads that ship in Surface devices (Surface Pro 2 and later) and modern Windows 10 devices from our OEM partners. Windows 10 takes advantage  of this hardware to enable system-wide gestures and better, more responsive scrolling than what was possible with older technology uninstall microsoft edge.

Microsoft Edge also utilizes PTPs to enable back/forward swipe and to enhance users’ scrolling experience via off-thread (aka independent) scrolling. Since PTP input is processed differently by the input stack in Windows 10, we wanted to ensure that we took advantage Support.Microsoft.Com/Help of this and that we gave users a scrolling How To Get Help in Windows 10 Keyboard  experience that felt as natural as their experience with touchscreens everywhere on the web.

However, the web has traditionally had a bit of a design flaw when it comes to scrolling, in the form of scroll jank — that ‘glitchy’ feeling that the page is stuck, and not keeping up with your finger while you’re scrolling.

Often, scroll jank is caused by mousewheel or Touch Event listeners on the page (these are often used Microsoft Customer Service for Microsoft Support Phone Number tracking user interactions or for implementing custom scrolling experiences):

If one of these listeners is going to modify the default scrolling behavior of the browser, the browser has Support.Microsoft.Com/Help to cancel its optimized default scroll altogether (accomplished by web developers calling preventDefault() within handlers). Since browsers don’t always know if the listener is going to cancel the scroll, however, they always wait until the listener code executes before proceeding How To Get Help in Windows 10 Keyboard  with the scroll, a delay which manifests itself as scroll jank.

Intersection Observers also help get around this issue by providing web developers with a mechanism to track user interactions with the page (to trigger lazy loading of infinite scrollers, for example) without affecting scrolling performance. These two approaches, however, still do not solve the cases where active event listeners are necessary Microsoft Support Phone Number, and require developers uninstall microsoft edge to be aware of the issues explained above and to change their sites in order for users to see improvements.

Given that we wanted to enable the best scrolling experience with PTP on as many sites as possible while minimizing developer work, we made the decision to not fire mousewheel events in response Support.Microsoft.Com/Help to PTP gestures (such as two finger pans). While this greatly reduced scroll jank and gave users a scrolling experience akin to the one they get on touchscreens, the lack of mousewheel events being fired uninstall microsoft edge Microsoft Customer Service unfortunately also meant that users were unable to zoom on sites such as Bing Maps and pan on sites that use custom scrolling controls (both of which expect mousewheel events coming from touchpads in order to operate).

Developers on our public issue tracker have made it clear that this has been a top pain point, however, the Microsoft Edge team wanted to ensure that the solution built to address these broken Microsoft Support Phone Number experiences not only fixed them, but also preserved the functional and performance benefits accrued by not firing mousewheel events.

PTP Pointer Events

As of EdgeHTML 17, Microsoft Edge will fire Pointer Events with a pointerType of “touch” in response to PTP gestures Support.Microsoft.Com/Help. While this is a departure from the mousewheel events of the past , we believe that the advantages to this approach more than justify the departure:

No additional overhead for modern websites

If your website already supports Pointer uninstall microsoft edge Events and touch, there is no additional work you need to do to take advantage Microsoft Customer Service of PTPs in Microsoft Edge; your site will just work!

If you have not yet Microsoft Support Phone Number implemented Pointer Event support, we strongly How To Get Help in Windows 10 Keyboard  recommend you check out the MDN documentation for Pointer Events to prepare your site for the modern web. Pointer Events are available on internet explorer 11, Microsoft Edge, Google chrome and firefox