Having web pages load dynamically means you can start reading content and viewing images sooner. The downside of course is that scrolling an unfinished page can result in your position jumping around, making it near impossible to peruse anyway. As of Chrome 51, this particular annoyance may soon be history.
Image by Logan Booker
If you’re using the latest version of Chrome, you can enable the feature easily by hitting up the browser’s internal Flags page. To access it, type the following into your address bar:
chrome://flags
Scroll down — or use in-page searching — to locate the “Scroll Anchoring” toggle (pictured in the lead image). Enable it and then restart your browser. And that’s it.
It’s amazing to think it’s taken this long for a browser vendor to implement a feature like this. It falls into the same category as noisy background tabs and auto-playing videos in terms of annoyances… just a lot more subtle.
Google Chrome Scroll Anchoring [gHacks]
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4 responses to “Chrome’s New Scroll Anchoring Fixes The Most Annoying Aspect Of Web Browsing”
I wish Windows File Explorer did the same thing: the delayed expansion of Favourites and other items makes the left pane jump around as well.
Since you mentioned it, how do we solve “noisy background tabs and auto-playing videos”?
There’s a flag which gives you quick access to mute a tab that’s playing sound.
Tab audio muting UI control Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS
When enabled, the audio indicators in the tab strip double as tab audio mute controls. This also adds commands in the tab context menu for quickly muting multiple selected tabs. #enable-tab-audio-muting
Auto playing videos is trickier though. If you mainly mean youtube, you can get an extension called Youtube Magic Actions which has some great features. Other than that, you might need to tell your plugins to only run after manually choosing to do so. (Settings > Advanced settings > Privacy > Content settings)
If they’re handled by a plugin (e.g. Flash), in Chrome:
Settings > Show advanced settings > Content Settings > Plugins: Let me choose when to run plugin content
When the page loads, videos won’t play (or even load) until you right click them and explicitly tell them to. I’m sure there are extensions that handle it a bit nicer, but this works for me.