Two finger scrolling is getting detected as a click - Discussion

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.