SOLVED

Two finger scrolling is getting detected as a click - Discussion

Microsoft

We’ve seen a lot of feedback around touchpad scrolling being either extremely fast or randomly right-clicking and wanted to let you know that we hear you and we’re investigating. At this point we believe the issue to be driver-related and are working with the appropriate driver developers to help root cause the precise issue and determine possible fixes. 

 

Getting into more details it appears to be related to Synaptics trackpads on HP and Lenovo devices and we’ve confirmed that comparing Microsoft Edge to Chrome on an HP device specifically showed that Microsoft Edge was getting 2-3x the scroll delta Chrome was getting. We haven’t explicitly seen the context menu being more sensitive (even testing on a device that reportedly had the issue) but during testing noticed that because of the extreme scroll, attempting to stop the scroll with 2 fingers to slow it down could cause the context menu to open at the end of the scroll. Overall it appears Microsoft Edge isn’t receiving the same functionality as Chrome, most likely due to having a different process name. 

 

While we’re following up with our partners at Synaptics we’re also investigating possible workarounds we can do in Microsoft Edge to address the issue as a workaround, longer-term having driver workarounds in the browser isn’t ideal but we want to do right by our customers and are considering all options to do so. 

40 Replies

@amswitzer What should not come as a surprise? If MS haven't done anything, I'd say it is surprising that Dev and official builds behave differently on the same PC.

...because that’s what MS has in their own notes. Ask them. Their documentation states it hasn’t been address even in the beta version. So it should not be a surprise that it doesn’t work. Just trying to help with info.

@amswitzer I think Synaptics is to blame here with HP and Lenovo for providing such very bad drivers for this touchpad. Even if it's compatible with precision drivers in many cases, they still use a very crappy synaptics driver. 

@Elliot Kirk says that "Microsoft Edge isn’t receiving the same functionality as Chrome, most likely due to having a different process name." , I'm pretty sure that this crappy synaptics driver has a kind of "if process name = Chrome then have this behavior...", because edge chromium has a different process name and is pretty new, the driver behaves differently. Hopefully they are working with synaptics and HP/Lenovo but the real problem is the syaptics driver itself that is crappy. It should be replaced with a precision touchpad driver whenever possible. This is a very well known problem for HP users, as you can see here :

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/28/18638862/hp-trackpad-windows-precision-drivers-fix-envy-laptops-h...

https://www.windowscentral.com/hp-needs-start-using-microsoft-precision-touchpads-now

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/6qz30h/enable_precision_touchpad_on_hp_spectre_x360_2017...

etc etc...

I totally agree, here is how I did it for HP spectre x360, it works with windows 1909 (the latest version for now):

 

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/Use-windows-precision-drivers-...

 

 

@pneenkoalabear 

 

THANK-YOU THANK-YOU THANK-YOU,

 

Your recommended solution not only fixed the problem with Edge; now that my HP Envy is using the right drivers, it's being correctly detected as a "Precision TouchPad" and I'm getting all kind of features I didn't get before.   Brilliant!!!

best response
Solution

Hey everyone!

 

We wanted to give an update on this issue as we've made some progress but before we do that we have a slight update to the original statement: We no longer believe Lenovo is impacted at all by this issue and instead believe it's exclusive to a subset of HP devices with Synaptics trackpads. Now on to the update!

 

We've finally reproduced the exact issue on a device and were able to determine the cause, we no longer believe this is due to the scroll delta issue. To get into specifics the driver was detecting the new Microsoft Edge as the old Microsoft Edge and sending touch input to the browser. Chromium's gesture recognizer handled the touch input differently from the old Microsoft Edge browser and this resulted in the context menu opening after a two-finger scroll. The reason this wasn't happening in other Chromium-based browsers was due to the driver specifically targeting Microsoft Edge, other browsers instead receive mouse wheel events when scrolling using the trackpad.

 

Between two separate fixes we've made, we now believe we've mitigated this such that the new Microsoft Edge will receive the same mouse wheel input as other Chromium-based browsers. This means that touch-based gestures will no longer work on these trackpads, but we believe overall this is the right direction for compatibility as we will behave similarly to other Chromium-based browsers. These changes are in today's Canary build (81.0.406.0). The first change specifically ignores the exact set of inputs we were receiving from the driver, while the second change, made for unrelated reasons, changes the window title to no longer include "Microsoft Edge"; the latter also broke the driver's recognition. We're already in the process of implementing the fixes in the Beta channel so that when Stable updates to 80 it will also have this fix.

 

Longer term we do plan to remove the mitigation that specifically ignores the bad set of inputs as we do know this creates another issue where you can't open the context menu on the first two-finger tap after a two-finger scroll on impacted devices. We instead are working on either a shim in-product or in Windows 10 to fix the issue while we also work longer-term to get the drivers updated. We know that Windows updates and driver updates aren't the perfect fix as any user who doesn't receive them would be stuck with this issue, so we're trying to find a good way to work around this in the product but know that may not be possible.

If you're experiencing other issues related to scrolling please continue to file feedback as we use that feedback to analyze and resolve issues.

@Clay_Martin  @Elliot Kirk  that is good news on the extra click issue - I am waiting for the fixes to appear in the Stable channel...

 

What I wanted to ask about again...  do you have any fixes for the zoom issue when I do a two-finger scroll down and my screen looks like this...

 

Edge Massive Zoom Issue-280120.jpg

This is my screen following scrolling down with two fingers, as you can see Edge is saying this is 100% zoom...  but it is clearly not.

 

We believe that's related to the trackpad sending touch input and are hoping it also goes away when it starts sending mouse wheel input instead. On the devices that we have that reproduced the issue we didn't notice it after we applied the mitigation.

@Clay_Martin 

 

Thanks for the update. Many of us have resolved this issue by removing the distributed Synapatics drivers from our machines and changing them for the Synaptics Windows Precision TouchPad drivers, which is what we should have gotten automatically from HP anyway.  

 

Since our Trackpads are working just fine now, will this fix working its way through the various steps break our working machines?   I certainly hope I won't be right back in the position I was in before with Edge being useless.

 

By the way, I'm not sure I understood.  Did you mean that in Canary when the fix is put in, the Trackpad won't work at all? That's what it seems to be saying.

thanks for the deets.

y'all should just get HP to use the Synaptics to PTP drivers tho

On my OG Synaptics drivers, using Edge Spartan was an exercise in masochism while win32 and UWP apps worked fine. There's little risk and I'm sure HP, Synaptics or Microsoft could do testing. You guys know more about drivers and touchpads.
please just use the PTP drivers i linked you neil. everything is so much better.
you're welcome! :)

scrolling is so much smoother, right? the gestures are cool too. Microsoft doesn't have as many options as the Synaptics drivers but at least the basics work well!

@pneenkoalabear I had a look at the links and they stated to have a USB mouse, in case there are issues.  I am currently working away staying in a hotel for work and I don’t have a USB mouse to hand.  I would have to acquire one before I attempt the driver removal.

 

@Clay_Martin Thank you for coming back on this.  That sounds great!

 

Do you have a time schedule for when then mitigations will be pushed out to the Stable channel?

 

Many thanks in advance 

 

>Since our Trackpads are working just fine now, will this fix working its way through the various steps break our working machines?
No, this will only mitigate machines that have the impacted drivers installed

>Did you mean that in Canary when the fix is put in, the Trackpad won't work at all?
No, this fix will allow machines with the impacted driver installed to work properly.
We stick closely to Chromium's release schedule available here:
https://chromiumdash.appspot.com/schedule

This means we should be having an update to stable sometime next week or thereabouts, I don't know the exact date.

@Clay_Martin 

" We no longer believe Lenovo is impacted at all by this issue"

 

I am new to this thread so I might have missed a chapter here, but my  lenovo ideapad 330 is still having the same 2 finger fast scrolling issue on the latest edge dev build.  What do I need to do?

@Clay_Martin  I wanted to let you know, following the Stable Edge browser on my laptop getting updated to Version 80.0.361.48 (Official build) (64-bit) on Friday evening, both of the issues that I was experiencing appear to have disappeared.

 

I wanted to wait a couple of days before posting, but in two sessions of at least a couple of hours - I haven't experienced the context menu appearing or the browser zooming in when I do a two-finger up or down...  I have just checked again, on a news site while writing this reply :cool:

@Clay_Martin 

Reporting from an HP OMEN Laptop with synaptic drivers, all up to date.

chromium Version 80.0.361.50 (Official build) (64-bit), i'm now proud to say... the issue is: GONE 

:hearteyes: