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smooth scrolling :(

toezter

toezter

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 12, 2004
205
0
Madison, WI
i just switched not too long ago, and i'm loving everything except for one thing...smooth scrolling in web browsing.

i mostly use safari, but occasionaly firefox. any way i can have smooth scrolling?
 
well on firefox, you can use the scroll wheel (as with safari). but with windows its a lot smoother action (visual), whereas on my ibook its not (stiff, staccato'ie motion).

wondering how i can change that.
 
I've actually noticed the same thing on my powerbook, and I don't know if there is a fix for it. I think part of it is the OS, but if you are using a laptop it might just not seem smooth because of the LCD (as opposed to a high refresh rate CRT).
 
vasaz said:
I've actually noticed the same thing on my powerbook, and I don't know if there is a fix for it. I think part of it is the OS, but if you are using a laptop it might just not seem smooth because of the LCD (as opposed to a high refresh rate CRT).
Click to expand...

i span most of my stuff onto my 17" lcd. i run windows and osx on it (KVM). its not the monitor.

but i think you're right on the OS factor. is there any script i can edit/make for it?
 
killuminati said:
can somebody please explain to me what smooth scrolling is?
Click to expand...
Scroll up and down no this page using OSX. See how is kind of jumpy/choppy, like its moving the page one line at a time? Smooth scrolling eliminates that, so the page goes up and down in a fluid motion. Nice to look at, but its hell on the processor.
 
On my lowly iBook 800 smooth scrolling is anything but... in fact, its smoother when turned off!
 
If I want to scroll smoothly in Safari, I grab the scroll bar (between the scroll arrows), and drag my window up and down at any speed I want. There's a very slight "motion blur" as the text moves up or down, but not nearly so bad that I can't read it.

A few apps, like AppleWorks, don't "do" live scrolling in that manner at all, whereas others, like TextEdit, scroll extremely smoothly.

And that's on a 600MHz iMac G3.
 
try camino from mozilla, that scrolls pretty smoothly for me. i find that firefox doesnt scroll nicely for me. infact i dont really like firefox, it just doesnt feel finished.
 
Smooth Scrolling was never quite smooth regardless of what version of OSX or Hardware combination you have. It is definitely an OS issue though and hopefully something that Tiger will adress. The smooth scrolling issue is also one of the primary reasons PC users think OSX is still sluggish. I have a Dual 2.5Ghz PowerMac with a Geforce 6800GT and 1.5GB of RAM and smooth srolling is not much smoother than on my imac G4 1Ghz with 768MB of RAM. Apple really needs to fix this srolling issue though. I don't see how Apple can make things like Expose, Dock Genie effect, Fast User swithching etc. so smooth yet we still can't scroll down a Webpage without feeling like your dragging the screen down under saran wrap.
 
toezter said:
works fine on my p3 933mhz winb0x.
Click to expand...
cool.

In Windows XP, if you adjust it for "maximum performance", it turns off smooth scrolling along with a bunch of other purely esthetic stuff.
 
smooth scrolling IS smooth. do you have something misconfigured in your font smoothing settings? it is very smooth with my 1.25GHz powerbook. very smooth.
 
Smooth scrolling and mouse/cursor speed do a lot of damage to the mac platform-- windows users who pay attention to that sort of thing (power users) are given the false impression that macs are "slow"-- I've played with a dual G5 in Apple stores and noticed these issues. Apple could easily address them and give users the "snappy" windows xp feel that they have grown to expect.
 
mac can never feel as snappy as windows. why? mac draws a window once the window is ready to be shown. windows draws a window once it has been asked to do so. therefore windows feels snappier because it doesn't care if there's anything to be show or not and trusts the app will refresh its window at some point, often resulting in white windows that only have a border and no content.

for some reason most of the people don't appreciate quality ;) they want everything fast, even if it were total crap.
 
JFreak said:
smooth scrolling IS smooth. do you have something misconfigured in your font smoothing settings? it is very smooth with my 1.25GHz powerbook. very smooth.
Click to expand...

hmm.... interesting does font smoothing have an effect on smooth scrolling? I just tried testing with different combinations of font smoothing and my smooth scrolling appears to be the same. Smooth scrolling when left on does make scrolling smoother however it is still choppier than it shoud be for my taste and it slows scrolling down alltoghther not to mention the fact that while smooth scrolling is on it sends my 2.5Ghz Powermacs fans into overdrive more often than when I have it off. For now I'll leave smooth scrolling off and and hope that it is better in Tiger. Try smooth scrolling on a PC and you will see the difference compared to OSX.
 
Little Endian said:
hmm.... interesting does font smoothing have an effect on smooth scrolling? I just tried testing with different combinations of font smoothing and my smooth scrolling appears to be the same. Smooth scrolling when left on does make scrolling smoother however it is still choppier than it shoud be for my taste and it slows scrolling down alltoghther not to mention the fact that while smooth scrolling is on it sends my 2.5Ghz Powermacs fans into overdrive more often than when I have it off. For now I'll leave smooth scrolling off and and hope that it is better in Tiger. Try smooth scrolling on a PC and you will see the difference compared to OSX.
Click to expand...

I think some people might be confusing smooth scrolling using a scroll wheel on the mouse vs just dragging down the bar (which is almost always smooth). If you use the mouse wheel, scrolling up/down in Safari is usually very choppy. Its worse on pages with flash, as those really suck up the CPU cycles.

Every mac i've seen except for the high end dual G5's seem to have this problem. And yes, it does contribute to a feeling of slugishness. As a matter of fact, it was the first thing I noticed when using a mac. I certainly do hope that Tiger fixes this issue by moving rendering onto the GPU intead of the CPU.
 
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