“A quick internet search should provide you with step-by-step instructions.”

In 2018, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie teamed up to make a short PSA about the dangers of frame rate interpolation, a.k.a. the soap opera effect:

It’s a strangely boring video from the men known for exciting filmmaking, but it captures a fascinating debate. TL; DR of their argument: Home TVs have an option to take a typical 24fps movie and create interim frames to make it feel like a 60fps production. It’s often on my default, but you should turn it off.

What’s interesting is that 60 or more fps is indeed in some ways objectively better: you see smoother movement, and you can notice more. Once you start paying attention, any whip pan or drastic movement in the cinematic 24fps appears very choppy…

…and, of course, that is completely missing the point. The argument for 24fps is that it’s simply cinema’s vernacular, right next to anamorphic lenses with their blue lens flares and vertical stretching. The movies are not about conveying information, but they are about conveying a certain feel. (And also, about tradition.)

I’m mentioning this because I spotted a similar battle happening when it comes to scrolling.

Go to any page in Vivaldi and hold a down arrow key for a while. That scrolls through the page, moving it in chunks, reacting immediately to the initial key press and then the synthesized autorepeat presses:

Firefox listens to the keys the same way, but it “upgrades” the choppiness to a 60fps movement by interpolating it:

And Safari does something different altogether – it approaches it more like a game physics engine would. It only listens to ↓ down (when it turns on the scrolling “motor”) and then ↓ up (when it turns it off):

This has an interesting effect: the movement is smoother than even Firefox’s – that’s because it doesn’t try to straighten something choppy, but it is itself smooth, by nature.

At the same time, this approach feels a bit loose, like driving an old 1960s car. It also takes away any control of speed; Safari pages always scroll at this rate, no matter your keyboard settings. (Arguably, however, control via the key repeat rate that other browsers respect is also an illusion, as it affects typing as well. Would you ever change it just to control the scroll speed?)

Of course, the analogy to frame interpolation doesn’t really make sense. Safari is not a soap opera, Firefox is not a smooth motion effect on your TV, and Vivaldi is not a cinematic experience. In contrast with movies and television, I don’t think there are any expectations or tradition here.

In this particular context, I believe Firefox and particularly Safari are better because this is about conveying information, and smoother scrolling does help your eyes and your brain connect all the little befores with all the little afters.

But I am sharing it mostly as a reminder that a keyboard is really just a button board by a different name. And sometimes it’s good to look at a key hold, and decide:

• is this a sequence of pulsating key presses,
• or is it a button being held down and then released up?

#interface design #keyboard #motion design #youtube