1835094 - Stuttery/janky trackpad scrolling for large Message Lists (but smooth with mouse wheel).

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Anton]

Steps to reproduce:

I scroll around the message list in my Outlook Inbox folder (~15000 messages).

Actual results:

The inbox scrolls perfectly smoothly when done via a mouse wheel, however, when using the laptop trackpad on the same computer, the renderer seems to skip a lot of frames.

Expected results:

Scrolling should be equally smooth on every input device, otherwise I regard it as a regression compared to the old XUL message list.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

That OS?

Comment 2

[Anton]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #1)

That OS?

Edition Windows 11 Pro
Version 22H2
OS build 22621.1702
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.22641.1000.0

Comment 3

[Calum Mackay]

Just to note an OS difference: no issues for me using a trackpad to scroll a 270,000 (sic) message Outlook IMAP inbox, on MacOS.

At least, it seems so; I don't have a wheeled mouse with which to compare.

115.0a1 (2023-05-25) (64-bit) — MacOS 13.3.1 (a) (22E772610a)

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Is it better now?

Comment 5

[Anton]

Attachment: TB-116.0a1-scrolling-mouse.mp4

Comment 6

[Anton]

Attachment: TB-116.0a1-scrolling-trackpad.mp4

Comment 7

[Anton]

I (In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #4)

Is it better now?

Neither mouse nor trackpad achieves a full 60fps in scrolling (~30 FPS I'd say; is there any way to reliably measure that now that it's rendered as HTML?), however, mouse scrolling has far less fluctuations in frame time now.

Trackpad scrolling has not seen an improvement. I've attached example footage of both input devices. It is important to point out that I am doing full swishes on the trackpad, however, in the video it looks choppy due to the FPS wildly spiking. Compare this to a single scroll with the mousewheel. Also, scrolling performance is the same when screen recording or not.

Comment 8

[Steve Edmonds]

I see the same effect on openSUSE, but it is also present in 102.
It seems to be there is a threshold where after your fingers have moved Ymm on the trackpad the software responds and scrolls the page then waits for another Ymm and scrolls again. The scrolls are not smooth but a series of jumps. If I drag my fingers very slowly the jumps occur about every 3mm of finger movement and scroll the message list 6 messages each jump.
This is not just TB but also Firefox with same size jumps.
In Libreoffice the jumps are about every 1mm of finger movement and each jump is may be 2 lines of text so much smoother.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Anton, do you also see this with Firefox?

Comment 10

[Anton]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #9)

Anton, do you also see this with Firefox?

No slow-scrolling lumps noticeable in Firefox. Hitches occur to me very rarely in day-to-day use there.

I've attempted to create a similar situation in Firefox. Using "gfx.webrender.debug.profiler" I measured ~ 55-61 FPS (laptop monitor is at 60hz, I assume FPS is locked) on a react virtual list demo page with following settings:

https://bvaughn.github.io/react-virtualized/#/components/List

• Num rows: 60 000
• List height: 900 (scrolled down in full-screen to have full viewport filled with virtual list)
• Row height: 15
• Overscan: 10

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Still fails?

Comment 12

[David McDivitt]

I don't see how this can be a Thunderbird issue but a hardware issue or OS issue. The title says good with mouse wheel which pretty much eliminates Thunderbird because, windows have one and only one window scroll message. Sometimes OS drivers will emulate a mouse if other hardware is used. For the trackpad this emulation may not be smooth and may be sending window messages in spurts or grouped together.

Comment 13

[Steve Edmonds]

Surely if this was an OS issue all applications on the OS would be similar, where as for me it is only FF and TB.

Comment 14

[Anton]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #11)

Still fails?

I don't notice any sizeable improvements unfortunately.

(In reply to David McDivitt from comment #12)

I don't see how this can be a Thunderbird issue but a hardware issue or OS issue. The title says good with mouse wheel which pretty much eliminates Thunderbird because, windows have one and only one window scroll message. Sometimes OS drivers will emulate a mouse if other hardware is used. For the trackpad this emulation may not be smooth and may be sending window messages in spurts or grouped together.

I agree that some vendors implement poor trackpad emulation over mousewheel events, I also saw some of them. However, the laptop I see this bug on has a Precision Touchpad driver and I hardly believe it to be an emulated one given that no other Application suffers from improper/janky scrolling deltas. In fact, in comment 10 I set up a reasonably similar scrollable list to investigate, whether the issue occurs in FIrefox, too (It did not).

Comment 15

[Arthur K. (he/him)]

Anton,

My experiences with Win 11 have been less than desirable. Hopefully some of these weird issues will be fixed in today's release of Win 11 23H2. Tech articles I've been reading allude to a lot of hardware improvements and bug fixes being in it.

I was wondering if you could try switching the trackpad driver to the default Windows one via device manager and leveraging disabling automatic driver updates via (https://pureinfotech.com/disable-automatic-driver-install-windows-11/#disable_driver_install_windows11) since Windows will surely revert any such change and put you on a driver it thinks it knows is better.

I recently fixed a similar issue for a customer on Win 11 (https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/inspiron/inspiron-5491-2-in-1-microphone-not-working-fixed/647f93a2f4ccf8a8de5bce1f) and it happened because Windows Update / Windows 11, not the user, upgraded the driver. Maybe even try rolling back to an earlier driver but make sure to turn off automatic driver updates (from link above) or you'll be right back to square 1. I too am leaning in the direction of it not being a TB issue.

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Anton, see comment 15 above.