What is Pull-to-Refresh?
Pull-to-refresh is a common mobile navigation gesture. In Google Chrome for Android, if you swipe downwards from the very top of a webpage, the browser will reload the page. This is indicated by a small spinning circular arrow that appears at the top of the screen.
While often convenient, this gesture can be incredibly frustrating if you frequently trigger it by accident when trying to scroll up quickly on long articles, or when playing web-based games that require rapid vertical swiping. If you find yourself constantly refreshing pages by mistake, you can disable the gesture entirely.
How to Disable Pull-to-Refresh in Chrome for Android
This setting is not found in the standard Chrome settings menu; instead, it is hidden within the advanced Chrome Flags section.
- Open the Google Chrome app on your Android device.
- Tap the address bar at the top of the screen, type the following URL, and press Enter:
chrome://flags- This will open the Experiments page. In the search box at the top of the page, type: Pull-to-refresh.
- You should see a flag titled Pull-to-refresh effect (or similar, depending on your exact version of Chrome).
- Tap the dropdown menu underneath the flag name (which usually says “Default”).
- Select Disabled from the list.
- A prompt will appear at the bottom of the screen telling you to restart the browser. Tap the blue Relaunch button.
Chrome will close and immediately reopen. Once the browser has restarted, swiping down from the top of a webpage will no longer trigger a page reload, allowing you to scroll as aggressively as you like without interruption.