What to do about scroll anchoring?

166 views
Skip to first unread message

Emilio Cobos Álvarez

unread,
Sep 27, 2019, 8:23:46 AM9/27/19
to dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Sean Voisen, abo...@mozilla.com, rh...@mozilla.com, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, Mike Taylor, Karl Dubost, Daniel Holbert
Hi,

(cc'ing webkit-dev@ and blink-dev@ in case they have feedback or
opinions, as WebKit is the only engine which does not implement scroll
anchoring, though I don't know if they plan to, and Blink is the only
other engine that does implement it. Please reply to dev-platform@ though.)

TLDR: Scroll anchoring is really a mess.

I didn't do the initial implementation of the feature in Gecko, but I've
done a ton of work over the last few months to fix compat issues in our
implementation (see all the bugs blocking [1]).

At this point, our implementation is mostly compatible with Blink, but
even with a bug-for-bug compatible implementation, we did get compat
issues because of different content being served for different browsers,
or because our anti-tracking protections changing the final content of
the page slightly ([2] is an example of bug which only reproduces with
ETP enabled only, but whose reduced test-case renders the site unusable
in Chrome as well).

If you hit one of the broken cases as a user you think the browser is
completely broken, and the site is just unusable.

I've fixed those by tweaking the heuristics Gecko uses. Those extra
heuristics have also caused other compat issues, like [3], reported
today, which will require other adjustments to the heuristics, etc...

On top of that, the spec is not in a good state, with ton of open issues
without feedback from the editors [4].

So right now I'm at a stage where I think that the feature is just not
worth it. It doesn't behave predictably enough for developers, and you
have no guarantee of it behaving consistently unless you test a
particular browser, with a particular content in a particular viewport
size... That's not great given the current dominant position of
Chromium-based browsers.

On top, issues with scroll anchoring are pretty hard to diagnose unless
you're aware of the feature.

All in all, it doesn't seem like the kind of feature that benefits a
diverse web (nor web developers for that matter), and I think we should
remove the feature from Gecko.

Does anyone have strong opinions against removing scroll anchoring from
Gecko, based on the above?

Thanks,

-- Emilio

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1519644
[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1561450
[3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1584499
[4]: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/labels/css-scroll-anchoring-1

Emilio Cobos Álvarez

unread,
Sep 27, 2019, 9:08:57 AM9/27/19
to dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com
And, to be clear, we _can_ fix these compat issues, some way or another.

One thought is to limit the amount of scroll adjustments without user
scrolling or stuff like that, which would prevent the "you get stuck on
the page".

Making anchoring opt-in rather than opt-out is another option, but that
defeats most of the purpose of the feature, I guess.

See also some of the Chromium docs on the compat issues they found[1]
and how were they trying to fix them before adding the
"layout-affecting-property changed" heuristic, which is what is on the
spec right now and what they implement.

I just think that these are very hacky heuristics that are just going to
bring a lot of compat pain and developer confusion.

It doesn't help that all these things can break or not depending on the
speed at which the user scrolls, the amount of scroll events that the
user dispatches, the timing of these events relative to other events, etc...

-- Emilio

[1]:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nQAO4MYCDMn0rTkn_-WI6gjumk3Qi2Bn-MGuB3NlVxE/edit
> _______________________________________________
> dev-platform mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform

Steve Kobes

unread,
Sep 27, 2019, 10:03:55 AM9/27/19
to Emilio Cobos Álvarez, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com
Hi Emilio,

My recollection is that scroll anchoring was, in fact, a mess.  I do not personally have any opinion about whether scroll anchoring should be removed from Gecko.

We (Chrome) decided to accept some compat issues for the sake of launching the feature.  This was a judgment call and could reasonably have gone the other way.

Steve

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/4fb3b637-50f5-1167-62a0-dffdeff06f48%40mozilla.com.

Emilio Cobos Álvarez

unread,
Sep 27, 2019, 10:16:48 AM9/27/19
to Steve Kobes, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com
Hi Steve,

On 9/27/19 4:03 PM, Steve Kobes wrote:
> Hi Emilio,
>
> My recollection is that scroll anchoring was, in fact, a mess.  I do not
> personally have any opinion about whether scroll anchoring should be
> removed from Gecko.
>
> We (Chrome) decided to accept some compat issues for the sake of
> launching the feature.  This was a judgment call and could reasonably
> have gone the other way.

Right, my concern is that taking compat fallout with Chrome's market
share may be acceptable, because people will likely fix their websites
if they misbehave.

But web developers may not take the same time to fix their site if it's
broken on Firefox for Android, for example, which in turn drives Firefox
users away (and you know this is a vicious cycle, the less users you
have, the less people will care about fixing their websites in your
browser).

That being said, more generally, I care about being interoperable /
predictable here for web developers, and seems like that ship may have
sailed if we need to fix some Gecko-specific issues by tweaking our
heuristics, but Chromium / Blink doesn't change them in the same way
(which is understandable, I guess, though I've filed spec issues for our
reasoning behind these changes, which I think would apply to Chrome as
well).

-- Emilio
> <mailto:dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org>
> > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
> <https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "blink-dev" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
> send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org
> <mailto:blink-dev%2Bunsu...@chromium.org>.
> <https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/4fb3b637-50f5-1167-62a0-dffdeff06f48%40mozilla.com>.
>

L. David Baron

unread,
Sep 27, 2019, 2:18:12 PM9/27/19
to Emilio Cobos Álvarez, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com
On Friday 2019-09-27 14:23 +0200, Emilio Cobos Álvarez wrote:
> Does anyone have strong opinions against removing scroll anchoring from
> Gecko, based on the above?

It seems pretty sad, since I think it's a very useful feature for a
large class of pages -- particularly pages that are more "documents"
than "applications".

I wonder if it would be possible to disable the feature under
certain conditions, for example:
* the page uses APIs that initiate scrolling from script, or
* the page has handlers for scroll events, or
* the page does both of the above
but leave the feature enabled for pages that don't do these things.

Based on what I've heard it seems like many of the cases where pages
are really broken involve some of those, although I haven't gone
through the bug lists.

-David

--
𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
𝄢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
- Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)

Botond Ballo

unread,
Sep 27, 2019, 6:34:22 PM9/27/19
to Emilio Cobos Álvarez, dev-platform, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, Ryan Hunt, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, Andreas Bovens
Emilio, thanks for all your work on this!

On Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 8:23 AM Emilio Cobos Álvarez <emi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Does anyone have strong opinions against removing scroll anchoring from
> Gecko, based on the above?

My 2c: it would be unfortunate to give up on scroll anchoring as a
feature altogether.

However, if we need to disable it for now, until its spec is in better
shape, I can understand that; especially as the code would
(presumably) still be there and users for whom it works well and
really want it can turn it back on by flipping the pref.

Thanks,
Botond

L. David Baron

unread,
Sep 28, 2019, 9:13:28 PM9/28/19
to Cameron McCormack, Emilio Cobos Álvarez, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, Ryan Hunt, Daniel Holbert, WebKit Development Mailing List, Mike Taylor, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com
On Sunday 2019-09-29 10:54 +1000, Cameron McCormack wrote:
> How useful is scroll anchoring outside of the two cases mentioned in https://drafts.csswg.org/css-scroll-anchoring/#intro i.e. images loading and ad iframes being inserted? Would it be feasible to make scroll anchoring a much less general mechanism, and to scope it down to handling these specific cases?

I think it's also quite useful for horizontal resizes of the browser
window (which can include device rotation on mobile, window
resizing/maximization on desktop, and also hiding/showing of browser
sidebar UI).

Rick Byers

unread,
Sep 28, 2019, 11:07:36 PM9/28/19
to Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Steve Kobes, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com, Philip Jägenstedt, Chris Harrelson, Tim Dresser
FWIW, I agree with this principle. I'm sorry you've had to do a lot of compat work on this Emilio. Are you saying you've found many cases where chromium's behavior doesn't match the spec / web-platform-tests and the different is relevant to real-world website compat (forcing you to invest in "bug-for-bug compatibility")? That would definitely make me very sad. Or is the issue more about compat with sites which have UA-conditional behavior (either explicit or implicit based on some other Gecko/blink difference?).

IMHO In general, either an initially chromium-only feature is valuable enough that we should continue to invest as necessary to achieve interop with other engines when they implement (eg. adding web-platform-tests and improving the spec for the inevitable cases that appear with a second implementation), or we should decide the feature isn't worth the cost to properly support on the web at large and remove it from chromium.

Steve is the expert and can probably elaborate on details, but IIRC the real world web compat constraints of scroll anchoring ended up requiring a number of tough tradeoffs. If you're learning about new web compat constraints, then it's entirely possible that the cost/benefit equation is now different and we should be re-evaluating whether it still makes sense to keep scroll anchoring in chromium. Like David I like the feature - but only to the extent that it works alright for most of the web as it exists today, and developers can reliably reason about it (eg. by replacing any heuristics designed under the constraints of web-compat with explicit APIs).

Can you give us a week or so to chat about this within the Chrome team and get back to you?

Thanks, and sorry again for the frustration. When we ship a feature first in chromium, it's always our intent that subsequent compatible implementations should be MUCH easier to ship (it's one of the main reasons we invest so much in web-platform-tests).

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/f2feb402-36ac-dbdb-dab7-9d91f7f5800d%40mozilla.com.

Emilio Cobos Álvarez

unread,
Sep 29, 2019, 5:24:36 PM9/29/19
to Rick Byers, Steve Kobes, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com, Philip Jägenstedt, Chris Harrelson, Tim Dresser
Well, part of it is that. The initial implementation took a lot of just
figuring out what Chromium was doing rather than implementing the spec,
because the spec had clear issues (like referencing the DOM rather than
layout stuff).

Some of them like [1] were pretty obvious and were caught during our
initial implementation of the feature. Others like [2] Ryan probably
found by testing Chromium's behavior.

Some other still pretty significant behavior differences were only
caught later by me and people finding compat issues in the wild, like
[3]. I was sad that the spec reflected absolutely nothing like what
Blink implements. For this issue in particular, Blink roughly uses
"whatever inherits from LayoutBox can be an anchor", which is obviously
not something that you can reasonably spec, and definitely not "block
boxes and text", which is what the spec said.

Those are off the top of my head, Ryan probably has more examples.

> IMHO In general, either an initially chromium-only feature is valuable
> enough that we should continue to invest as necessary to achieve interop
> with other engines when they implement (eg. adding web-platform-tests
> and improving the spec for the inevitable cases that appear with a
> second implementation), or we should decide the feature isn't worth the
> cost to properly support on the web at large and remove it from chromium.
>
> Steve is the expert and can probably elaborate on details, but IIRC the
> real world web compat constraints of scroll anchoring ended up requiring
> a number of tough tradeoffs. If you're learning about new web compat
> constraints, then it's entirely possible that the cost/benefit equation
> is now different and we should be re-evaluating whether it still makes
> sense to keep scroll anchoring in chromium. Like David I like the
> feature - but only to the extent that it works alright for most of the
> web as it exists today, and developers can reliably reason about it (eg.
> by replacing any heuristics designed under the constraints of web-compat
> with explicit APIs).
>
> Can you give us a week or so to chat about this within the Chrome team
> and get back to you?
>
> Thanks, and sorry again for the frustration. When we ship a feature
> first in chromium, it's always our intent that subsequent compatible
> implementations should be MUCH easier to ship (it's one of the main
> reasons we invest so much in web-platform-tests).

Sure, no worries, and thanks for the reply.

-- Emilio

[1]: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/3480
[2]: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/3319
[3]: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4247


>   -- Emilio
>
> > On Fri, 27 Sep 2019 at 09:09, Emilio Cobos Álvarez
> <emi...@mozilla.com <mailto:emi...@mozilla.com>
> >     <mailto:dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> <mailto:dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org>>
> >      > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
> <https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform>
> >     <https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
> <https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform>>
> >
> >     --
> >     You received this message because you are subscribed to the
> Google
> >     Groups "blink-dev" group.
> >     To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
> >     send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org
> <mailto:blink-dev%2Bunsu...@chromium.org>
> >     <mailto:blink-dev%2Bunsu...@chromium.org
> <mailto:blink-dev%252Buns...@chromium.org>>.
> >     To view this discussion on the web visit
> >
> https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/4fb3b637-50f5-1167-62a0-dffdeff06f48%40mozilla.com
> <https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/4fb3b637-50f5-1167-62a0-dffdeff06f48%40mozilla.com>
> >
>  <https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/4fb3b637-50f5-1167-62a0-dffdeff06f48%40mozilla.com <https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/4fb3b637-50f5-1167-62a0-dffdeff06f48%40mozilla.com>>.
> >
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "blink-dev" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
> send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org
> <mailto:blink-dev%2Bunsu...@chromium.org>.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/f2feb402-36ac-dbdb-dab7-9d91f7f5800d%40mozilla.com
> <https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/f2feb402-36ac-dbdb-dab7-9d91f7f5800d%40mozilla.com>.
>

Chris Harrelson

unread,
Sep 30, 2019, 11:37:16 AM9/30/19
to Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Rick Byers, Steve Kobes, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com, Philip Jägenstedt, Tim Dresser
On Sun, Sep 29, 2019 at 2:24 PM Emilio Cobos Álvarez <emi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
 pretty significant behavior differences were only
caught later by me and people finding compat issues in the wild, like
[3]. I was sad that the spec reflected absolutely nothing like what
Blink implements. For this issue in particular, Blink roughly uses
"whatever inherits from LayoutBox can be an anchor", which is obviously
not something that you can reasonably spec, and definitely not "block
boxes and text", which is what the spec said.

Quick note: this one can be spec'ed. The classes that inherit from LayoutBox all map directly to spec concepts.
 

Jonathan Kew

unread,
Sep 30, 2019, 12:05:57 PM9/30/19
to Botond Ballo, Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, Ryan Hunt, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, Andreas Bovens, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, dev-platform
On 27/09/2019 23:19, Botond Ballo wrote:
> Emilio, thanks for all your work on this!
>
> On Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 8:23 AM Emilio Cobos Álvarez <emi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>> Does anyone have strong opinions against removing scroll anchoring from
>> Gecko, based on the above?
>
> My 2c: it would be unfortunate to give up on scroll anchoring as a
> feature altogether.

Yes.

> However, if we need to disable it for now, until its spec is in better
> shape, I can understand that;

I'd be concerned that if we disable it, we'll in effect no longer be
providing useful implementation feedback to help shape the spec, and
neither site nor spec authors will be guided towards anything better or
more clearly defined than "however Chrome behaves".

> especially as the code would
> (presumably) still be there and users for whom it works well and
> really want it can turn it back on by flipping the pref.

Although our chances of noticing regressions in this code will be
greatly diminished (as well as the likelihood of noticing site authoring
problems and spec shortcomings).

JK

Simon Fraser

unread,
Sep 30, 2019, 12:06:09 PM9/30/19
to Emilio Cobos Álvarez, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, WebKit Development Mailing List, Mike Taylor, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com

> On Sep 27, 2019, at 10:08 PM, Emilio Cobos Álvarez <emi...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> And, to be clear, we _can_ fix these compat issues, some way or another.
>
> One thought is to limit the amount of scroll adjustments without user scrolling or stuff like that, which would prevent the "you get stuck on the page".
>
> Making anchoring opt-in rather than opt-out is another option, but that defeats most of the purpose of the feature, I guess.
>
> See also some of the Chromium docs on the compat issues they found[1] and how were they trying to fix them before adding the "layout-affecting-property changed" heuristic, which is what is on the spec right now and what they implement.
>
> I just think that these are very hacky heuristics that are just going to bring a lot of compat pain and developer confusion.
>
> It doesn't help that all these things can break or not depending on the speed at which the user scrolls, the amount of scroll events that the user dispatches, the timing of these events relative to other events, etc…


I expressed my main issue with scroll anchoring at the F2F, which is that it’s an on-by-default behavior that is making up for bad web authoring, and is harmful if only implemented by a subset of browsers.

I would support removing it entirely, or having it be opt-in.

Simon

Matt Woodrow

unread,
Sep 30, 2019, 12:06:32 PM9/30/19
to Cameron McCormack, Emilio Cobos Álvarez, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, Ryan Hunt, Daniel Holbert, WebKit Development Mailing List, Mike Taylor, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com
On 29/09/19 1:54 PM, Cameron McCormack wrote:
> How useful is scroll anchoring outside of the two cases mentioned in https://drafts.csswg.org/css-scroll-anchoring/#intro i.e. images loading and ad iframes being inserted? Would it be feasible to make scroll anchoring a much less general mechanism, and to scope it down to handling these specific cases?

The virtual-scroller[1]/rendersubtree[2] demo that the Chromium team
demoed at TPAC was also relying on scroll anchoring.

When you use the scrollbar to jump to a given spot, the custom scroller
element then makes surrounding elements visible. Making them visible
changes them from using their content-size [3] placeholder size to the
real size, and we don't want the viewport to move in the process.

- Matt


[1] https://github.com/WICG/virtual-scroller

[2] https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/4862

[3] https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4229

Mike Taylor

unread,
Oct 7, 2019, 2:11:14 PM10/7/19
to Rick Byers, Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Steve Kobes, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com, Philip Jägenstedt, Chris Harrelson, Tim Dresser
Hi Rick,

On 9/28/19 10:07 PM, Rick Byers wrote:
> Can you give us a week or so to chat about this within the Chrome team
> and get back to you?

Any updates here?

Thanks.

--
Mike Taylor
Web Compat, Mozilla

Rick Byers

unread,
Oct 10, 2019, 5:13:42 PM10/10/19
to Mike Taylor, Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Steve Kobes, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com, Philip Jägenstedt, Chris Harrelson, Tim Dresser, nbu...@chromium.org, Navid Zolghadr
Sorry for the delay.

We agree that scroll anchoring has unrealized potential to be valuable for the web at large, and to make that happen we should be investing a lot more working with y'all (and if we can't succeed, probably removing it from chromium). Concretely +Chris Harrelson who leads rendering for Chrome (and likely someone else from his team), as well as +Nick Burris from the Chrome input team will start digging in ASAP. In addition to just the normal high-bandwidth engineer-to-engineer collaboration between chromium and gecko I propose the following high-level goals for our work:
  • Ensure that there are no known deviations in behavior between chromium and the spec (one way or the other).
  • Ensure all the (non-ua-specific) site compat constraints folks are hitting are captured in web-platform-tests. I.e. if Gecko passes the tests and serves a chromium UA string it should work as well as in Chrome (modulo other unrelated UA compat issues of course).
  • Look for any reasonable opportunity to help deal with UA-specific compat issues (i.e. those that show up on sites that are explicitly looking for a Gecko UA string or other engine-specific feature). This may include making changes in the spec / chromium implementation. This is probably the toughest one, but I'm optimistic that if we nail the first two, we can find some reasonable tradeoff for the hard parts that are left here. Philip (our overall interop lead) has volunteered to help out here as well.
Does that sound about right? Any suggestions on the best forum for tight engineering collaboration? GitHub good enough, or maybe get on an IRC / slack channel together somewhere?

Rick

Chris Harrelson

unread,
Oct 18, 2019, 1:20:17 PM10/18/19
to Rick Byers, Mike Taylor, Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Steve Kobes, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, WebKit Development Mailing List, blink-dev, abo...@mozilla.com, Philip Jägenstedt, Tim Dresser, nbu...@chromium.org, Navid Zolghadr
Hi,

Another quick update: Emilio, Navid, Nick, Stefan and I met today and discussed which issues are important to fix and why. We now have a list of spec issues, and WPT tests to fix that are Chromium bugs, that should substantially improve interop. Nick and Stefan will take on the work to fix them, with the review and feedback support of Emilio.

Thanks all,
Chris


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.

Emilio Cobos Álvarez

unread,
Oct 29, 2019, 6:03:42 PM10/29/19
to Chris Harrelson, Rick Byers, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, Steve Kobes, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, abo...@mozilla.com, nbu...@chromium.org, WebKit Development Mailing List, Philip Jägenstedt, Navid Zolghadr, blink-dev, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Tim Dresser, dba...@dbaron.org
Hi all,

10/18/19 7:19 PM, Chris Harrelson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Another quick update: Emilio, Navid, Nick, Stefan and I met today and
> discussed which issues are important to fix and why. We now have a list of
> spec issues, and WPT tests to fix that are Chromium bugs, that should
> substantially improve interop. Nick and Stefan will take on the work to fix
> them, with the review and feedback support of Emilio.

So, today another scroll-anchoring bug crossed my radar, and this one
I'm not sure at all how to fix it, because there's no obvious answer
here as far as I can tell.

My diagnosis (for one of the pages, the one I could repro and reduce) is
in here[1], but basically my current explanation is that the page should
be broken per spec, and that when it works it's hitting a bug in both
Chromium[2] which we have an equivalent of but are just not hitting
because in Firefox changing `overflow` does more/different layout work
than in Chrome.

The test-case may as well work if we change our scroll event or timer
scheduling (see there), but that is obviously pretty flaky.

I honestly don't have many better ideas for more fancy heursitics about
how to unbreak that kind of site. From the point of view of the
anchoring code, the page is just toggling height somewhere above the
anchor, which is the case where scroll anchoring _should_ work, usually.

I can, of course (and may as a short-term band-aid, not sure yet) add
`overflow` to the magic list of properties like `position` that suppress
scroll anchoring everywhere in the scroller, but that'd be just kicking
the can down the road and waiting for the next difference in layout
performance optimizations between Blink and Gecko to hit us.

I think (about to go on PTO for the next of the week) I'll add telemetry
for pages that have scroll event listeners, and see if disabling scroll
anchoring on a node when there are scroll event listeners attached to it
is something reasonable (plus adding an explicit opt-in of course).

I'm not terribly hopeful that the percentage of such documents is going
to be terribly big, to be honest, but providing an opt-in and doing
outreach may be a reasonable alternative.

Another idea would be to restrict the number of consecutive scrolls made
by scroll anchoring to a given number at most. That would made the
experience in such broken websites somewhat less annoying, but it'll
also show flickering until that happens, which would make the browser
still look broken :/.

Thoughts / ideas I may not have thought of/be aware of?

Thanks,

-- Emilio

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1592094#c15
[2]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=920289

> Thanks all,
> Chris
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 2:13 PM Rick Byers <rby...@chromium.org> wrote:
>
>> Sorry for the delay.
>>
>> We agree that scroll anchoring has unrealized potential to be valuable for
>> the web at large, and to make that happen we should be investing a lot more
>> working with y'all (and if we can't succeed, probably removing it from
>> chromium). Concretely +Chris Harrelson who leads rendering for Chrome (and
>> likely someone else from his team), as well as +Nick Burris from the Chrome
>> input team will start digging in ASAP. In addition to just the normal
>> high-bandwidth engineer-to-engineer collaboration between chromium and
>> gecko I propose the following high-level goals for our work:
>>
>> - Ensure that there are no known deviations in behavior between
>> chromium and the spec (one way or the other).
>> - Ensure all the (non-ua-specific) site compat constraints folks are
>> hitting are captured in web-platform-tests. I.e. if Gecko passes the tests
>> and serves a chromium UA string it should work as well as in Chrome (modulo
>> other unrelated UA compat issues of course).
>> - Look for any reasonable opportunity to help deal with UA-specific
>> <https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/CAFUtAY-DPW4tXA_R-c0WAj76Qtj4TYdjwHai3odyNdWYVfJhZA%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>
>> .
>>
> _______________________________________________
> dev-platform mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
>

Chris Harrelson

unread,
Nov 6, 2019, 6:07:30 PM11/6/19
to Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Rick Byers, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, Steve Kobes, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, abo...@mozilla.com, nbu...@chromium.org, WebKit Development Mailing List, Philip Jägenstedt, Navid Zolghadr, blink-dev, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Tim Dresser, L. David Baron
HI Emilio,

I'll follow up on crbug.com/920289. Let's discuss there.

Emilio Cobos Álvarez

unread,
Feb 20, 2020, 10:39:21 AM2/20/20
to Chris Harrelson, Rick Byers, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, Steve Kobes, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, abo...@mozilla.com, nbu...@chromium.org, WebKit Development Mailing List, Philip Jägenstedt, Navid Zolghadr, blink-dev, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Tim Dresser, L. David Baron
A quick status update here:

I landed some heuristics to disable scroll anchoring in pathological
cases in Firefox a long while ago. This stopped virtually all compat
issues, though it's obviously not great.

Chris and other Chromium folks have been doing work to fix Chromium
issues that were causing these interop problems, and improving the
scroll anchoring spec.

So I'm going to try and peek up those spec changes in Firefox and then
try to remove those heuristics on Nightly, and see how it goes.

-- Emilio

On 11/7/19 12:07 AM, Chris Harrelson wrote:
> HI Emilio,
>
> I'll follow up on crbug.com/920289 <http://crbug.com/920289>. Let's
> <mailto:blink-dev%2Bunsu...@chromium.org>.
> <https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/CAFUtAY-DPW4tXA_R-c0WAj76Qtj4TYdjwHai3odyNdWYVfJhZA%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer
> <mailto:dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org>
> > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
> <https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform>
> >
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "blink-dev" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
> send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org
> <mailto:blink-dev%2Bunsu...@chromium.org>.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/8b44aa83-914f-344a-6da2-a56917230156%40mozilla.com
> <https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/8b44aa83-914f-344a-6da2-a56917230156%40mozilla.com>.
>

Chris Harrelson

unread,
Feb 20, 2020, 1:39:14 PM2/20/20
to Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Rick Byers, Karl Dubost, Sean Voisen, Steve Kobes, rh...@mozilla.com, Daniel Holbert, Mike Taylor, abo...@mozilla.com, Nick Burris, WebKit Development Mailing List, Philip Jägenstedt, Navid Zolghadr, blink-dev, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org, Tim Dresser, L. David Baron
Hi Emlio,

Thanks for your patience with these fixes and taking the time to outline your concerns. Hope things are better now, and as always, if not just say so. :)

Chris

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/7baea287-a45e-ed96-9f24-40916da92770%40mozilla.com.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages