Ever found yourself scrolling through a web page only to discover it would jump back to the top once it actually finished loading a slow element? Well, Google thinks that’s an annoying problem that needs fixing, and now the Chrome browser will finally fix it for you.
Google explained in a blog post that a new feature called scroll anchoring will prevent such behavior in the future, especially on mobile devices.
“These annoying page jumps typically happen when the website inserts an image or other content above the visible area, pushing down what’s on the screen,” Google said. “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.”
The best part here is that Google will also fix an unwanted side effect of page jumping. Page jumps can cause accidental clicks on certain links on a page. You may want to click a specific link only to find that you’re heading in a different direction thanks to a page jump that forced you to tap or click the wrong link. That may even have some serious security implications when loading shady pages with links to even more suspicious places — hey, it can happen.
In a nutshell, the new scroll anchoring feature will let you continue to read the article you were scrolling and click on the links you wanted to access in the first place without having to deal with any page jumping. Here’s the feature in action on Android:
