Let’s face it:Google Chromeon Android often doesn’t feel quite as smooth as it does on iOS. Chrome engineers acknowledge as much themselves, and withAndroid 14, they wanted to get to the bottom of why scrolling feels more natural and less janky on iOS than on the Google OS. This is where a new API in Android 14 comes in that allows Chrome — and even other apps later down the road — to deal with touch input sampling much better, resulting in up to 2x less visible jank in Chrome 116.
Google explored the problem and its solution in great technical detailon its Chromium Blog, but it all boils down to how Chrome for Android deals with input events. With the advent of displays with 90Hz and faster refresh rates in recent years, janky scrolling became more apparent, but most other Android apps could fix this by switching to a different, buffered touch input sampling algorithm that makes them feel smoother.
Due to historic reasons and the need to ensure web compatibility, Chrome couldn’t switch to this method. The browser has to use unbuffered input, meaning that it receives input events as soon as possible. On high-refresh rate screens, this can lead to cases where the input sampling isn’t consistent with the refresh rate, and thus, janky scrolling ensues.
While Chrome can’t switch to the method used by other apps, the Google engineers could fix the problem by leveraging a new nanosecond API, which allows Chrome to sample input touches at a nanosecond interval rather than at a millisecond level. This was a limitation with the previous Java-based method used by Chrome. There was still a matter of fine-tuning the algorithm that predicts motion and movement on these super-short time frames, but in the end, the company arrived at an up to two times smoother scrolling experience. In a slow-motionvideo shared by the company, the results speak for themselves.
Support for the nanosecond API is rolling out as part of Chrome 116, and the company was able to backport it all the way to Chrome 110, where it’s available as an optional flag. Google is confident that this change “brings Chrome on Android on par with Chrome on iOS.”
While it may take some time for your phone to receive stable Android 14, this ensures that once you do get it, you will be able to get a much smoother browsing experience right from the start. It’s likely that other Chromium-based browsers have received or will receive this same change. The nanosecond API is public in Android, meaning that other apps can also take use of it. This could be helpful for browsers that don’t rely on Chromium, with Firefox being the only mainstream example, and any other app that don’t use Android’s standard linear input sampling for whatever reason.
