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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article. I am still waiting to get my hands on an iPad Pro to compare it to the Surface Book clipboard. I am primarily interested in comparing the drawing performance but there are lots of ways you can make a more dedicated system perform its intended task better than a more general system. When I bought the Surface book I understood that I was paying a premium for that generality.

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I've tried both quite extensively. FWIW, iPad Pro _feels_ faster and more fluid. Still not the right device for me, but I had no complaints wrt performance. I did not buy iPad Pro though: not the right device for what I do. I did buy the Surface Book, but took it back to the store a couple of days later. It was bluescreening a couple of times a day seemingly due to driver issues. Its UI performance was choppy as well, particularly scrolling non-WinRT apps such as e.g. Chrome or Firefox. This was basically the top of the line Core i7 model, so I expect that things are even worse with the lower end models.

Firefox and Chrome are frankly not good at scrolling smoothly in step with fingers. I use FF on my desktop and phone, but run IE on my Surface because of this. Chrome is tolerable (smooth, but the momentum is wrong). Firefox sucks.

Haven't checked in on the Mac versions lately, but I remember the same experience in FF there a couple of years ago. It feels like scrolling was designed entirely around moving in 3-line chunks per click of the mouse wheel, with some smoothing done for longer continuous spins. Then they tried to bolt incrementless trackpad scrolling on top of that and it went really poorly.

My primary machine is a MacBook Pro, and it has no problems scrolling Firefox or Chrome. Neither does my dual boot Win10/Linux workstation downstairs. I think choppy scrolling is mostly a trackpad issue in this case, TBH. The settings aren't quite right. Disabling pinch zoom gesture improves things a bit, but for $2900 I expect that I wouldn't have to resort to hacks to get the core functionality working.

I have a Surface Pro 3 and I confirm what wlesieutre said. Scrolling with the touchpad on the Typecover is completely smooth in Firefox, but for some reason, this isn't smooth when using the touchscreen. I don't know why.

Ah good point, I was referring to the touchscreen more than the touchpad.

Firefox scrolls smoothly on the touchpad, though it definitely has perceptible lag compared to IE.

I hope Firefox does something for the Windows 10 integration :/ I would like to use it in tablet mode, but the keyboard almost never pops up when in a text field, scrolling with the touchscreen is choppy, it is not really optimized for tablets. But performances are great.

Mine too is the top of the line one, FWIW, the November WIN10 update fixed 90% of the early issues. Generally it doesn't do well when it has a 'reboot required' update queued and its waiting to do it. So far a full reboot which allows the update to process brings it back.

I have not had scrolling issues on Firefox or Edge.

I intend to try another SB 6-9 months down the line. I think the hardware shows a lot of promise once they iron out the kinks.

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