It's Time For Laptop Companies To Switch To Precision Touchpad (arstechnica.com)

A new Windows 10 insider build (version 14946) comes with a new interface for configuring touchpad gestures. In the recent months, Microsoft has also improved the detection of two-finger gestures and clicking on Windows 10, and also added new four-finger gestures. These are welcome changes, and something that many would find useful. Except they won't because their computers likely don't comply with Precision Touchpad spec. ArsTechnica has an opinion piece today in which journalist Peter Bright is calling on all the OEMs to do the needful changes moving forward. From the article: Precision Touchpad made its debut with Windows 8. Co-developed between Microsoft and touchpad company Synaptics, the spec changed how Windows works with touchpads. Traditionally, touchpads masqueraded to Windows as essentially USB- or PS/2-connected mice -- simple two-dimension, single-input devices. Features such as multitouch and gestures were handled by a combination of the touchpad firmware and proprietary drivers. This meant that Windows itself had no ability to add new gestures or refine the finger-detection algorithms; it was all an opaque feature of the third-party drivers. With Precision Touchpad, the raw touchpad input is exposed to Windows itself, allowing the operating system to choose how it handles the complex multi-finger inputs. The gestures, the disambiguation of taps and swipes -- these are all now performed by Windows, not a third-party driver. Unfortunately, many PC OEMs haven't been equipping their laptops with Precision Touchpads. As such, they can't take advantage of the new Windows capabilities. As far as we can tell, it would normally be straightforward for an OEM to make the switch; touchpads from Synaptics, for example, can work as both Precision Touchpads and "legacy" mouse-emulating touchpads that use the Synaptics driver. It's just up to the OEM to pick one option or the other.

Comments

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Macs have had this distinct advantage over Windows-intended laptops for a long time. Dell, Lenovo, I'm looking at you...y'all trackpads SUCK.

Re: Good

[Nunya666]

Yep. IBM Thinkpads started that years ago. A lot of people hate it but those track pads are just where the base of my thumbs are and I hit the damn thing and the focus goes somewhere else and it's so fast I don't where it went. I've blown away a lot of work because as I was typing away, the base of thumb grazed the damn pad.

At least with the 'clit' (I like that), if you nudge it, the cursor isn't too far away and the focus doesn't go somewhere else.

So just disable that feature.

Personally, I disable all trackpad features other than 2-finger scrolling. I don't want different behavior because of which side (or corner) of the trackpad I just touched, nor do I want a double-touch to become a double-click, nor do I want a single tap to move the focus.