Proposal: Embed WebView2 Control into a Scrollviewer and disable the Chromium-style scrolling by default

[EP012014]

Proposal: Embed WebView2 Control into a Scrollviewer and disable the Chromium-style scrolling by default

Summary

Due to the limited performance of Chromium WebView2 scrolling especially on touch screen or trackpad ，use UWP ScrollViewers to give a smoother scrolling similar to EdgeHTML WebView.

Rationale

• Chromium scrolling is not smooth enough to give a good experience to touch-screen and trackpad users.
• A ScrollViewer can give a scrolling experience similar to other UWP apps or the EdgeHTML WebView, to provide a continuous and immersive experience for al users.

• WebView2 is not optimized for touch inputs and trackpad .

Scope

| Capability | Priority |
| Use UWP ScrollViewer instead of WebView2 default | Must |
| Disable the scroll of WebView2 | Must |

Important Notes

UWPlize the experience of WebView2!

[StephenLPeters]

@predavid and @codendone FYI

[seven-mile]

Pretty good. More radical solution is to update(rebuild) Edge's smooth scrolling experience directly, which was satisfactory when using old EdgeHTML. And I guess there must have been someone who proposed this in the FeedbackHub.

[EP012014]

Pretty good. More radical solution is to update(rebuild) Edge's smooth scrolling experience directly, which was satisfactory when using old EdgeHTML. And I guess there must have been someone who proposed this in the FeedbackHub.

Using UWP-Styled ScrollViewer? That's pretty nice! But I think that needs a lot of hard work to integrate it into Chromium rendering system.

[sylveon]

Edge itself has fairly decent handling of touchpad/touch screens already. I think a better ask would be to enable that handling in WebView 2, because AFAIK WebView 2 captures all input in it so a ScrollViewer can't work since there's no way for it to get input and recognize scroll/pan gestures.

[JaiganeshKumaran]

At least make the scrollbar thumb look modern by default for all pages unless overridden by the site, it looks terrible currently.

[codendone]

The approach proposed here is probably not going to happen. If WebView2 drew into an enormous surface the width/height of the entire page, that would provide the desired smooth scrolling experience but would have a huge performance cost for that surface. That surface cost could be mitigated if WebView2 drew into a XAML VirtualSurfaceImageSource, which would require significant design changes and other complexities due to the WebView2 Runtime rendering outside of the app process.

It sounds like this was just one idea, though, and the core request for this proposal is "Ensure WebView2 has a smooth scrolling experience". If that is correct, then I suggest we focus this proposal on that request.

@JaiganeshKumaran I agree it would be good to have the scrollbar visuals match. Could you log that as a separate issue?

[krschau]

For reference, item for updating scrollbar look is here: #6192