To the author: This website seems to use something called SmoothScroll (edit: a javascript library) which makes my scrolling really really jumpy/janky. I'm using chrome on a MacBook with the touchpad. Made it basically impossible to scroll around the page which in turn made it very difficult for me to read the article.
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."
(Note: I'm not saying such things aren't annoying—it's the opposite—which is why we need a site guideline to prevent discussions from being dominated by them.)
Also to the author: This is most likely costing you readers.
Just weighing the pros and cons here:
Pro: People who don't have smooth scrolling mouses will suddenly enjoy smooth scrolling on this website. Even this is a questionable "pro". Most people have scrolling setup how they want it and don't need it fixed on a per-website basis.
Con: Degradating a core function of the computer (scrolling) for people who already have smooth scrolling.
So to summarize: The plugin is not helping anyone read the blog, but it is preventing/annoying many people from reading it.
It's not really rare. Chrome tends to be a bit more "adventurous" and experimental, while Safari and Firefox are a bit more conservative. So it's not uncommon to see a few weird issues show up in Chrome.
Messing with native scrolling as a web antipattern is right up there with interfering with copy and paste. I will never understand why people do these things.
My first web development job was for a Rails consultancy, where the owner of which explicitly stated that our apps were not designed to support using the back button. On another occasion, this same person responded to user reports of page zooming breaking the site with a counter of "then don't zoom the page".
These moments were two of the first wherein I strongly reconsidered whether I had made the right career choices.
the browsers cannot control a dev that uses AJAX to continually redraw the page without causing the browser to update the history/location. typically a sign of a) a dev new to AJAX or b) a solo dev that created a PoC that got turned into a product with very little thought about things like history/state/etc. I myself am an option B person.
Basically every single big site screws this up when lazy loading content - Twitter, YouTube, etc. If I drag down the scrollbar to position content where I want it on the page, invariably content gets loaded and pushed to the page. Because I am fixing the scrollbar by holding down the mouse button, the page jumps to a new position.
It is infuriating because this is solveable in many ways, the simplest being not to push during a mouseDown event.
But my new most hated thing is Google lazy showing details when I mouse over a result. Which means if I quickly go to click on the second link I mouse past the first link and it expands to the space where the second link was, so I either click the wrong link or have to reorient and then click the second link. I can't imagine how or why that feature exists.
I'm using Chrome and Windows10 but also got unpleasant behavior. I can't quite tell whats going on for multiple pushes of the scroll wheel but one 'tick' would push the page a set amount, and then a moment later the movement was repeated (but without the prompting input). Adds up to kind of a 'gross' overall feeling when scrolling.
EDIT: when scrolling with the arrow keys it looks like theres an attempt at 'smoothing' but it really feels more like inertia and damping and is pretty unpleasant.
That this behavior is called "SmoothScroll" is what pushes it over the boundary for me firmly into self-satire (and so I am in stitches playing from laughing so hard at your great description and then experiencing the actual behavior); who writes these scripts, and why? :(
Works fine on Firefox for me. On the other hand, the text is in a small and thin font, light gray on a white background making it unreadable on my screen. Reader mode to the rescue, once again.
