The Jittery Scroll
Google Chrome utilizes a rendering feature known as “Smooth Scrolling.” When you press the down arrow key, use the scroll wheel on a standard mouse, or swipe on a trackpad, Chrome attempts to animate the movement of the webpage. Instead of instantly jumping down 10 lines of text, it mathematically interpolates the movement, sliding the page down in a continuous, fluid motion. While visually pleasing on high-refresh-rate monitors, smooth scrolling can be highly problematic on older computers, lower-end laptops, or when using specific mouse drivers. On these systems, the mathematical animation taxes the CPU, resulting in a jittery, stuttering scroll that feels laggy, unresponsive, and can even induce motion sickness in some users.
Restoring the Snap Scroll
To regain instant responsiveness, eliminate the stuttering animations, and disable smooth scrolling completely in Google Chrome, you must dive into the browser’s hidden experimental flags.
Open a new tab in Google Chrome. Click into the address bar at the very top of the window, type exactly chrome://flags, and press Enter. This will load the “Experiments” page, displaying a long list of internal rendering settings. At the top of this page is a search bar. Type Smooth Scrolling into this search bar. The list will filter down to a single flag named “Smooth Scrolling,” which controls the animation when scrolling page content. Click the dropdown menu located to the right of this flag (which is likely set to “Default”) and change it to Disabled. A blue button labelled Relaunch will immediately appear at the bottom right of the window. Click this button to restart the browser. When Chrome reopens, scrolling will instantly snap to the next section without any intermediate animation.