What is Scroll Anchoring?
Have you ever been reading an article on Google Chrome, only for the page to suddenly jump violently downward, causing you to lose your place? This happens because images and advertisements located at the top of the page (which you already scrolled past) finally finish loading. As they pop into existence, they push all the text beneath them further down the page.
To fix this, Google introduced “Scroll Anchor Serialization.” This feature attempts to “anchor” the text you are currently looking at, automatically adjusting your scroll position in the background so that the text stays perfectly still while the images load above it. While this is usually helpful, on poorly coded websites or complex web apps, the anchoring algorithm can malfunction, causing the page to stutter, jitter, or become completely unresponsive to your mouse wheel. If a specific website is constantly bouncing up and down, you can disable the anchoring feature.
How to Disable Scroll Anchoring in Chrome
Because this is a core rendering engine feature, you must disable it using the experimental Chrome Flags menu.
- Open Google Chrome on your desktop.
- Click into the URL address bar at the top, type the following exactly, and press Enter:
chrome://flags- You are now in the experimental features menu. In the search box at the very top of this page, type Scroll Anchor Serialization.
- The specific flag will appear highlighted in yellow. Next to it, click the dropdown menu that currently says “Default.”
- Change the selection to Disabled.
- A blue Relaunch button will appear at the absolute bottom of the Chrome window. Click it to restart your browser.
Once Chrome reboots, it will stop attempting to calculate scroll offsets on the fly. Pages will load natively, which will fix the jittering on broken websites (though you may experience traditional page jumping if ads load slowly).