Edge is probably causing a 2 finger touchpad scroll issue

Edge[German]Just a brief information:  It's about Windows 10 notebooks on which there were issues with recognizing the 2-finger scrolling on the trackpad, which was recognized as a mouse click. The reason seems to be the chromium based Edge.


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The whole thing probably occurs on HP computers with Synaptics trackpads (Lenovos are said to cause problems as well). Blog reader Alexander J. sent me a text from a discussion in the Microsoft Tech Community (thanks for that). I'm just now getting around to posting this here. The problem is that 2-finger scrolling is recognized as a mouse click.

Re: 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.

Anyone affected by this?


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5 Responses to Edge is probably causing a 2 finger touchpad scroll issue

  1. Linda says:

    I have a month old Lenovo laptop and can't use Edge because of this. It's like I'm running in place. I am using Firefox but would like to use Edge but it's just too frustrating. Is there a fix for this?

  2. scorpio says:

    I'm facing the same issue on an HP Pavilion Power Pro 15 inch. Chrome and Firefox work fine. Changing the user agent doesn't make any difference. It's insane how you would end up copying data all around on Google sheets if you use it in Edge, but not otherwise..

  3. please fix this says:

    yeah, it happens occasionally to both my surface tablet and thinkpad. it's slightly annoying, tbh.

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  5. me says:

    yep same here.
    Microsoft :-) still causing as much hassle for users as always :-)

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