Google Chrome Will Finally Support Windows Precision Touchpad For Smoother Scrolling

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The simple touchpad has evolved over the years from a device that was just used to move the mouse pointer to one that you could tap (or press) to represent a click to now where they’ve started to gain a number of gestures for all sorts of controls. Windows Precision Touchpad has enabled people to perform various tasks using certain gestures of the touchpad, but it hasn’t been something that’s performed well with Chrome—particularly the two-finger scroll gesture. However, Google Chrome is finally starting to fix these issues and will support Windows Precision Touchpad for smoother scrolling.

Complaints about how Google Chrome handles Microsoft’s Precision Touchpad initiative go back years. These complaints tend to be highly upvoted on the various community forums and folks have even gone to Google’s own bug report forums in an attempt to shine some light on this issue. If we were to use these gestures on Microsoft’s Edge browser then features like scrolling up/down with two-fingers makes the website scroll smoothly. However, when this is done in Chrome it is incredibly janky and results in a poor user experience.

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If you were lucky to find one of the workarounds, then you may have even forgotten that this issue existed. There is an experimental Chrome flag called Enable Smooth Scrolling that had been reported to help fix the issue and others have found that installing the SmoothScroll Chrome extension has helped. Thankfully though, Google has begun working on fixing these issues and Google Chrome will finally natively support Windows Precision Touchpad.

We discovered a commit that shows Google is adding support for Direct Manipulation which is something that is required in order to get Windows Precision Touchpad to work. To start with, another commit shows the popular pinch-to-zoom gesture is being added to Google Chrome as well. While it’s definitely disappointing that Google has taken this long to fix the issue, we’re happy to see there is work being done to finally add support for this feature.