When you use the scroll wheel on your mouse or swipe down on a trackpad in Google Chrome, you may occasionally notice that the webpage moves in rigid, jerky “steps” rather than gliding smoothly down the screen. This choppy scrolling experience is especially noticeable on high-refresh-rate monitors (120Hz or 144Hz) or when reading long, text-heavy articles.
To fix this, Google built a specific rendering engine feature called “Smooth Scrolling.” When activated, Chrome uses an animation curve to interpolate the movement between your mouse wheel clicks, making the webpage glide fluidly up and down the screen. While usually enabled by default on modern hardware, it can occasionally be disabled by conflicting driver updates or older operating systems. You can manually force this feature to activate.
How to Enable Smooth Scrolling in Google Chrome
You must dive into Chrome’s hidden developer flags to forcefully activate the smooth scrolling animation engine.
- Open the Google Chrome browser.
- Click on the address bar at the top of the window, type
chrome://flags, and press Enter. - In the “Search flags” search box at the top of the screen, type Smooth Scrolling.
- Look for the specific flag with that exact name. The description will state that it “animates smoothly when scrolling page content.”
- Click the drop-down menu next to this entry (which is likely set to “Default” or “Disabled”).
- Select Enabled from the drop-down menu.
- A prompt will appear at the bottom of the screen stating “Your changes will take effect the next time you relaunch Chrome.” Click the blue Relaunch button.
Chrome will restart. Try scrolling through a long webpage like Reddit or Wikipedia. You will immediately notice that the rigid, line-by-line jumping has been replaced by a fluid, buttery-smooth gliding animation, significantly reducing eye strain while reading.