Google Fixes Chrome's Annoying Page Jumps In New Update

Page jumps, some of the biggest annoyances on the Chrome web browser have finally been given a fix by Google. In Chrome’s latest update, Google has added what’s called as scroll anchoring.

Page jumps on the Chrome web browser usually occur when a user scrolls down on a webpage before it finishes loading. The page will suddenly jump upwards to the top when it finally fully loads. This has become a huge problem for users who may have smartphones with smaller screens, and has been a constant annoyance to users on Mac and Windows computers.

“With the newest Chrome update, we’re introducing something called scroll anchoring, which locks the content you’re currently looking at to the screen, keeping you in the same spot so you can keep reading,” Google software engineer Steve Kobes said in a blog post. The company also shared a side-by-side comparison showing exactly how it works.

The Chrome browser without scroll anchoring (L) shows a page jumping to the top when it fully loads, while the one with the new feature (R) loads the page successfully and stays put where the user scrolled down to.

Google has warned web developers that scroll anchoring might not work perfectly for everybody due to the sheer vastness of the web. This is why Google will ship the new feature with the “overflow-anchor CSS property” to override the function, the company said on its Chromium blog. Scroll anchoring will also automatically be disabled on webpages that may have complex interactive layouts.

Scroll anchoring is far from being perfect, but Google says that it now blocks an average of three jumps per page view. Web developers are encouraged to report webpages where the function is misbehaving so that Google can further improve it in future updates. The function has been on by default since Chrome 56.