PSA: Web devs, can we stop breaking scrolling?

There has been a trend over the last few years to override the default scrolling mechanism in browsers or to otherwise break scrolling through other means.

The laptop I've been using for the last 5-6 years is perfectly adequate for everything I do except scrolling on some of the websites being built today. It has 8GB RAM, an Intel Core i5 CPU and integrated graphics. It's not a beast of a machine, but that's the point. It's a good machine that is even powerful enough to play games like Civ V. Yet it can't scroll half of your websites without grinding to a halt or something else horrible happening.

I was just trying to read this article from the HN front page: https://mymodernmet.com/carl-stormer-hidden-camera-photography/

I can't. I literally can't scroll the page on my laptop, at least not whilst it's still loading. It did just try to make me download a bunch of files though so perhaps that site is compromised.

The usual experience is a site using some sort of "smooth scrolling" JS library that may work well on the latest MacBook but on this regular laptop of mine it's like wading through honey. Each two-finger swipe on the touchpad scrolls the page half a line of text for instance.

I think collectively as web developers it's important to recognise that if you're going to override core functionality in a browser you'd best be prepared to test it on a wide range of devices. Because not being able to scroll or having the browser/tab lock up in response to such a basic action is unacceptable.

Thanks.