To be implemented via Asynchronous Panning and Zooming (APZ)

Feb 10, 2016 03:30 GMT  ·  By

According to a new and lengthy post published by Kartikaya Gupta on the Mozilla Hacks website, it looks like the upcoming Firefox 46 web browser will finally bring smooth scrolling to the desktop.

Now, we don't know how many of you out there are experiencing scrolling issues when browsing various web pages on the Internet, but it appears to be a major problem if Mozilla is going to all the trouble of implementing smoother scrolling support into its popular Firefox web browser.

"Have you ever been on Facebook or Twitter, merrily scrolling down the page, when all of a sudden, the browser appears to freeze? For several long seconds it just hangs there, and you’re not sure if it’s going to crash or not. Then, finally, something gives way, and the page jumps to catch up to your scrolling, disorienting you," developer explained.

As a personal note, I have never encountered such issues with recent versions of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and trust me, I use it more than 15 hours a day on Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems (but mostly Linux). And when I say recent, I mean from Mozilla Firefox 40 onwards.

Smooth scrolling is also coming to Google Chrome

If you've been reading the news lately, you may have noticed that Google is also preparing to implement smoother scrolling for upcoming versions of the Chrome web browser. Well, don't get us wrong, it's a good thing to add smoother scrolling support, but considering that most of us have decent hardware, we don't see the point.

Now, Mozilla says that smooth scrolling is coming to Firefox 46 Beta, but taking into account the fact that the browser is still in the Alpha stages of development, that will take a while. So expect to get a taste of Mozilla's latest smooth scrolling implementation in Firefox 46 Beta sometime in the first week of March 2016.