1025734 - Scrolling long views is very painful

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia, defect)

Description

[Aras Balali Moghaddam]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140608211622

Steps to reproduce:

* Go to a page/view in any app that has a large amount of content in it (scroll height is huge), for example:
  * a very long article in a web page (this is related to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1016688)
  * a very long play list in the music app
  * contact list of a social butterfly
  * inbox of a product manager
  * marketplace app, viewing a large category (after loading several pager)
* try to get to the bottom of the page
* good job! now go back to the very top.



Actual results:

* observe that the finger you used for scrolling is now in deep pain and you may need to put ice on it

I am testing this using the flatfish tablet. It seems that scrolling is specially difficult on the tablet, compared to keon for example. But as far as I remember, in most of these cases, scrolling is still pretty hard even using a phone.


Expected results:

* I should have been able to get to the bottom with one quick flick and back to the very top with another quick flick

I think there are a few factors that are making scrolling difficult accross the board. 
1) Flick or scrolling gesture often does not seem to register
2) when is does register, in most cases friction is so high that scrolling stops almost immediately
3) scrolling animation is a often a bit choppy

I think all these factor together are making the scrolling experience very poor. I have not looked into the code yet and don’t have the technical knowledge to know if there is some common code that is responsible for gesture/scrolling. However, I open this general bug because I think we need to at least set a guideline for how scrolling should work across the board, even if the implementation is completely separate in each app. Ideally we would want the scrolling to feel snappy and smooth, but most of all uniform across all apps. User can quickly learn how fast they need to flick their finger to get to the very top or bottom of the page. The friction should be reduced enough and momentum/acceleration of the flicking gesture should be taken into account. When user does a fast flick, content should keep scrolling for a while -- unless of course if user puts their finger back on the screen, which should stop the scrolling.

related discussion on discourse: https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/bug-scrolling-back-to-top-is-painful/533

I look forward to the day this issue will be resolved

Comment 1

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on