== I don't like smooth scrolling

Courtesy of upgrading my home machine to Fedora 8 and getting a new version
of [[liferea http://liferea.sf.net/]] in the bargain, I have been reminded
of something: I really don't like applications that do smooth scrolling.

While I could pick specific nits, I suspect that a good part of this
comes down to metaphor choices; I tend to think of scrolling as a 'turn
the page' action, for which the closest computer equivalent is just
immediately replacing the text with no fancy effects (although I want a
line or two of context, which you can't get with physical objects).
People with different metaphors probably would find the page turning
approach irritating and a good way to lose their context.

(And it's true that my way has a big jump between scrolling a bit, with
cursor keys or a scroll wheel or gestures, and scrolling a lot with page
down/page up keys.)

Unfortunately, since smooth scrolling by default is so prevalent, I
suspect that there are solid human factors reasons for it and thus that
I am going to keep running into this. However, I really wish programmers
would at least expose an explicit option for this in their programs; not
all of us want the slow flickering visual distraction.

=== Sidebar: my nits with smooth scrolling

There's a number of specific things that bug me about smooth scrolling:

* it at least feels slower (I don't know if it is), and I resent waiting
  just because the computer wants to show me that it's clever.
* it's visually distracting.
* it unpleasantly reminds me of CRT and [[LCD screen flickering
  ../tech/LCDRefreshRates]].
* often, it effectively forces me to defocus my eyes briefly
  because otherwise I automatically try to read the scrolling text.
  (This depends on the scroll speed.)

All in all it makes me feel that I'm being forced to wait for a visually
distracting effect just so the system can show me that it's clever.