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IE11 and broken scrolling

When I first installed Windows 10 preview on my laptop, IE11 scrolling stopped working when using the touchpad to scroll. Interestingly scrolling worked great in all other programs: explorer, outlook, one note, and many others. For IE11, unless I click on the tab title, and avoid clicking on anything else in the tab area, scrolling did not work. It was quite an annoying behavior, but not a show stopper for trying out Windows 10. I ended up learning how to use the keyboard for scrolling through the web pages in lieu of touchpad goodness.


With preview updates, the problem did not get any better, so I searched on the web to see if the issue was widespread. It turns out that it was, and it was not restricted to Windows 10 preview either. There were a lot of solutions online, that did not make much sense, like resetting IE11, going to the advanced tab and disabling smooth scrolling, and a slew of others. The one that made sense was a problem in the Synaptics driver, which for older style applications such as IE11 sends the wrong scroll messages to the scrollbars. The fix was obvious, upgrade the driver to the latest version. After upgrading  to 19.0.12.61, touchpad scrolling worked again in IE11. I still use the keyboard shortcuts though.

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