[webkit-dev] Mouse wheel event precision

Thu Jun 10 11:01:27 PDT 2010

On Jun 9, 2010, at 3:51 PM, David Hyatt wrote:
> On Jun 9, 2010, at 2:25 AM, Andy Estes wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jun 8, 2010, at 8:34 PM, Nathan Vander Wilt wrote:
>> 
>>> What Safari 4 seemed to do was simply provide much greater precision, where scrolling half a line simply yielded about 20 units instead of being ignored. So the above code would yield integral deltas in browsers that only fired events in 3-line increments, but nice fractional deltas in WebKit.
>> 
>> Some sites choose to completely ignore wheel deltas less than 120.  On devices like trackpads where a slow but continuous scrolling gesture tends to result in a series of small, non-cumulative mousewheel events, the old behavior caused these gestures to be completely ignored.  Yahoo! Mail was one such site where the small fractional values caused compatibility issues.
>> 
>>> What Safari 5's WebKit does is turn one "line" into 4800 (!) units instead of 40.
>> 
>> This could be plausible on a trackpad that scales the wheelDelta based on gesture velocity, although I'd expect a value of 120 for each tick of a conventional wheel mouse.  As Peter said, if you have a test case where Safari disagrees with IE on Windows or Chrome on either platform, please file a bug and we'll investigate.
> 
> Just a guess, but we might have a regression when dealing with the continuous events generated by a MacBook trackpad.

Thanks, David. I am testing this with my MacBook trackpad (and attached Magic Mouse) in Safari 5.

The following demo will need some massaging to work in IE, but shows the problem. Scrolling down so "Line 4." is at the top of the page yields a deltaSum of -7200 (!). Interpreted according to MSDN documentation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536951(VS.85).aspx) this would -60 "increments" (which IIRC are 3-line chunks each) and over seven thousand pixels according to Quirksmode's interpretation (http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/w3c_events.html, grep wheelDelta) of that property. Basically, the wheelDelta values are 60 times what they should be.

On Safari 4, the deltaSum ends up at -120 as expected when scrolling down to "Line 4", although quite helpfully the sum can be reached gradually when the mouse has smooth scrolling. So I would concur that this a regression of some sort.

thanks,
-natevw

====== SAMPLE CODE ======

<html>
<head>
<title>Testing Safari 5 mouse wheel events</title>
<script>
	var deltaSum = 0;
	document.addEventListener("mousewheel", function (e) {
								  deltaSum += e.wheelDeltaY;
								  document.getElementById("dbg").innerText = deltaSum.toString();
							  });
</script>
</head>
<body>
Line 1.<br/>
Line 2.<br/>
Line 3.<br/>
Line 4.<br/>
Line 5.<br/>
Line 6.<br/>
deltaSum: <span id="dbg">-</span>

<div style="height: 5000000px"></div>
</body>
</html>