Panning was slow in Edge browser

Community Help
1

Dear Observable team,

Developing observable notebooks is fun. :grinning:

While developing observable notebooks we found there was especially noticeable delay when panning around network diagrams in Edge browser.

This is the notebook we tested in two Edge browsers (version 40 and 44), Chrome and Firefox running on a Dell laptop with Intel core i5, 16GB memory.

When i set node count to 20 or higher, panning responded slowly in Edge, but remained fairly smooth in Chrome and Firefox.

This was a simple example with cola.js computing initial position of nodes and links, while panning was handled through d3.drag callback and select join APIs.

As we are recently testing our notebooks over large surface display such as Surface Hub which shipped only with Edge browser, is there any suggestion improving its panning performance in Edge?

Thank you

2

In early 2020, Microsoft is going to update Edge to use Chrome’s engine, and the new version is available as a beta. This should fix your issue, but I’m not sure if that timeline would work for you.

3

Thanks Jed,

We managed to run our example in Chrome from our PC while it connected to Surface Hub as a guest device. The panning example worked fine in Chrome but at the cost of data transfer of touch and pen events and updated DOM elements from PC to display screen.

Compared with simply using mouse panning from a PC and reflecting data on the screen (almost real-time), this approach took longer and noticeable delay in panning, but it’s better than running in Edge directly.

We will still search for other possible means to speed up our notebooks in Edge.
Thanks :slight_smile:

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