Latest Edge Insider Canary build fixes scrolling crashes

Kareem Anderson

Microsoft, Edge Insider

When Microsoft announced that it was going to drop its development of EdgeHTML and begin work on a Chromium-based alternative, some fans and users feared that all the beneficial engineering done for Edge on Windows 10 would be lost.

Thankfully, as early developer and Insider builds are revealing, the Edge team has been able to port some of the features users have come to enjoy and rely on such as stored passwords, extensions, and Edge scrolling.

However, perfecting Edge’s scrolling dynamics on the Chromium-based browser has proven to be a bit of a task as other Chromium-based browsers do not leverage the unique Windows 10 and EdgeHMTL off-thread scrollbar engineering.

In an attempt to optimize scrolling on the Chromium-based Edge, the developers pushed out a Canary build last week that was causing some browsers to crash when attempting to scroll.

Earlier this week Microsoft acknowledged and put out a fix for ‘Canary’ Insiders and developers who were reporting issues with the way the Chromium Edge browser handled scrolling with the browser often crashing when applying two-finger touchpad gestures or just after page loads.

As by the very nature of Canary software development, Microsoft’s expeditiousness on the matter is expected but the company has made it a priority to port its arguably superior scrolling technology to the new Chromium Edge browser as well as the open source project itself.

In a world of diminishing differentiators between general web browsing experiences, smoothing scrolling is something Microsoft cannot afford to leave by the wayside as it continues to build its replacement browser and industry alternative.