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  • Crazy smooth scrolling in latest version of Orion is very disorienting

  • BugsDesktopDone

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Install Orion 0.99.122-beta (WebKit 615.1.11.7)
  2. Open Orion and open any page which can be scrolled
  3. Scroll with spacebar, arrow keys or pagedown/pageup

Expected behavior:
Browser should scroll instantly or near instant. What it does with latest version is smooth delayed scrolling which is very disorienting and can cause sickness. Vlad mentioned on Discord that this is WebKit behavior, but Safari on macOS Ventura does NOT scroll with such huge delays. There is a slight noticeable delay but it scrolls near instantaneously.

This should either be fixed, or there should be an option to disable this smooth scrolling. This is an accessbility issue. Please don't tie this to any "reduced motion" OS flags, because personally I don't want my OS crippled with lack of animations, but this smooth scroll makes me sick.

Orion, OS version; hardware type:
Orion 0.99.122-beta (WebKit 615.1.11.7), macOS Ventura 13.0 (22A380), Mac Studio M1 Max

Image/Video:
Left is Orion, right is Safari 16.1 (18614.2.9.1.12)

  • Vlad replied to this.

    frin It is not clear to me what the problem is after watching the videos. Orion's scrolling (on the left) looks much smoother then Safari's which does it in jerky steps. I personally prefer the left but am curious to hear what others says.

        Vlad the problem is that it's particularly bad if you have motion sickness, and it is especially bad while holding down the down arrow key because the scrolling feels delayed. Scrolling in Safari is not problematic.

            Just for reference I recorded scrolling in Orion and Safari while pressing keydown.

            Orion is smooth while Safari is jerky. I hear million times tha tusers want smoother scrolling, a nd this is the first time I hear that jerky is preferred. Very curious.

            • nano replied to this.

              1VbBoIlR9XB3dFKh interesting. I tried setting these two but they don't seem to have any effect on this scrolling behavior:

              defaults write com.kagi.kagimacOS EventHandlerDrivenSmoothKeyboardScrollingEnabled -bool false
              defaults write com.kagi.kagimacOS NSScrollAnimationEnabled -bool false

              • Vlad replied to this.

                  frin We are not checking those flags afaik.

                  Note that Orion uses newer WebKit than Safari and the change pointed out may be coming to Safari too. You can see that by difference in rendering, it appears to me that WebKit in Orion renders a slightly more darker purple than Safari currently.

                      Vlad

                      I hear million times tha tusers want smoother scrolling,

                      the issue is that this is bad for trackpad and magic mouse users as it adds additional smoothing that is not consistent with the rest of the os. this "jerky" scrolling only happens when using arrow keys or a traditional mouse with a scroll wheel.

                      smooth scrolling can already be achieved externally with a program like mos and those who wish to have smooth scrolling systemwide probably already use that. regardless, an option to disable this smooth scrolling to be in line with safari and the rest of the system would be ideal.

                          nano
                          So far, I haven't noticed any difference in trackpad scrolling. and my Razer mouse scrolls linearly, as it did in the previous version.

                              16 days later

                              I have smooth scrolling disabled system-wide via defaults write -g NSScrollAnimationEnabled -bool false but Orion (0.99.122) isn't respecting that. It's also really choppy, but that's an aside – it simply shouldn't be smooth scrolling! Any way to disable smooth scrolling in Orion?

                                11 days later
                                2 months later

                                This is one of the last remaining things stopping me from using Orion consistently.

                                The scrolling when hitting the space bar is too slow, and as what happens to @frin, is incredibly disorientating and if I used it consistently would give me a headache.

                                Its not the 'smoothness' per se, but the time it takes Orion takes to scroll. In real-time Safari is just as 'smooth', but it simply doesn't take the same amount of time to get from A to B.

                                I'm talking specifically about hitting the space bar, Fn + Down or Option + Down keys. Not the arrow keys, scroll wheel or mousepad.

                                  a year later

                                  @Vlad done
                                  As of now, chrome, firefox, safari, orion all have some sort of smooth scroll, but duration of the scroll seems to go:
                                  chrome < firefox < safari/orion.

                                  Orion's smooth scroll now is roughly as safari from OP's video.

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