Aaround 5% of touch scrolls take longer than 100ms to begin on Chrome for Android (and a catastrophic 500ms delay is not unusual during page load) [from https://github.com/WICG/EventListenerOptions/blob/gh-pages/explainer.md].
In 2016 we want to cut off this long-tail of scroll start responsiveness completely. I.e. 99th percentile of touch scroll start should be <100ms.
Doing this responsibly without causing a bunch of developer pain requires care and thoughtfulness. See http://bit.ly/user-agent-intervention
So first we're blocked on having really good features and developer guidance in place so that there's no good reason to ever block scrolling. We're almost there with passive event listeners ( issue 489802 ).
This bug tracks the next step of shipping an intervention that iteratively improves scroll responsiveness on the worst performing sites, effectively forcing all their touch listeners to be passive. The details are tricky and contentious, but we intend to be very data-driven in sticking a good tradeoff and then iterating over time to ratchet up the quality of experience. Design doc forthcoming.
Comment 1 by rbyers@chromium.org
, Mar 31 2016