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Cloud772's avatar
Cloud772
Copper Contributor
Jun 26, 2020

Windows 10 - Scrolling on touchscreens and writing with a pen

Hi there,

I could not find this special feature in your top feedback - or I could not relate it to your list.

With the old Edge you where able to switch between your pen to write on pdf-documents or websites and using your finger to easily scroll down without clicking "write" again. This feature was the reason for me to prefer Edge instead of Adobe Reader to write on Documents. It just fundamentally improved your workflow.

I figured out, that it is possible to scroll with two fingers, but this isn't very comfortable. Espacially, because it this works not very well (zoom instead of scoling often times) and you get used to the differentiation of finger and pen from the old edge.

Is there a plan to implement this?

 

  • erwingd's avatar
    erwingd
    Copper Contributor

    Cloud772I can't beleive you got rid of this functionnality. I just received my laptop with a touch screen and a stylus, that I bought because of this feature: I'm working on PDFs every day.

     

    I'm just so disapointed.

     

    Indeed, you can scroll using the side panels, but if you touch the document by mistake you have to spend seconds cleaning it. It's just so frustrating.

     

    For the record you forced your users to switch to edge if they used "reader" which had this feature enabled. And you don't allow users to switch back to reader.

     

    This is nonsense.

     

    Erwin.

  • martinnn's avatar
    martinnn
    Iron Contributor
    Here's a little tip: NEVER use Chromium Edge if you have a touchscreen device, period. It's a terrible experience. The only reason to use Chromium Edge over Classic Edge is that it can search through history and that they dropped syncing functionality with Classic Edge.
  • Cloud772 Thanks for reaching out with that great question. I know that there has been discussion internally about pen functionalities, so I will loop in the team to see if they have any updates to publicly share.

     

    Fawkes (they/them)
    Project & Community Manager - Microsoft Edge

    • Feelx's avatar
      Feelx
      Copper Contributor
      Would be great if this feature comes back!
      It's literally the same for me to prefer Edge over e.g. Adobe Reader. Also I find the scrolling with two fingers confusing...
    • shashankov's avatar
      shashankov
      Copper Contributor

      Deleted Is there any update on this. I use the Surface Pro 7 and it's really irritating using the two finger scrolling which always tends to zoom in or our instead of simply scrolling and it's not smooth at all.

       

      I had to install the blocker to get back the legacy Edge since I mainly used it to ink on PDFs and I can't use it as the sole browser.

      • Deleted's avatar
        Deleted

        shashankov Thanks for bringing this back up. I looped back with our pen-action feature owners on this and will let you know if/when they have any updates to share.

         

        Fawkes (they/them)
        Program Manager & Community Manager - Microsoft Edge

    • WillAdams's avatar
      WillAdams
      Copper Contributor
      I've been using styluses since a Koala Pad on a Commodore 64 in my old high school's computer lab.

      I've become accustomed to the normal behaviour since Go Corp. PenPoint and Windows for Pen Computing.

      Using touch for scrolling and the active stylus for interaction with text and controls is elegant, efficient, and expressive --- dumbing the stylus down to an 11th touch input was roundly shouted down pretty much everytime some naïve user suggested it --- why remove the functionality which an active stylus affords? Scrolling can easily be done with touch, even when holding a stylus and allows a user to switch between them naturally.

      https://github.com/TheJoeFin/Windows10-Community/issues/17

      Please at least afford an option to restore the original stylus functionality which doesn't involve turning off Windows Ink and switching to a different browser. (Yes, we know Google made this behaviour the default on Chrome --- please consider that this is because they are dumbing styluses down to the lowest possible common denominator.)
  • WillAdams's avatar
    WillAdams
    Copper Contributor

    Cloud772 

     

    As noted at:

     

    https://github.com/TheJoeFin/Windows10-Community/issues/17

     

    >in Firefox, but it's not perfect, and it requires an about:config change: dom.w3c_pointer_events.scroll_by_pen.enabled set it to False.
    >This allows for highlighting text with the pen (as it should be), but it still doesn't let you drag tabs or the like with the pen. You can with a double tap and hold, touch, but not pen (which makes no sense to me).

     

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