Have you ever started reading an article on a webpage, only for a massive image or video advertisement to suddenly load at the very top of the page, violently shoving the text you were reading down off the screen? Google Chrome attempted to fix this behavior with a feature called “Scroll Anchoring,” which tries to lock your current view in place even as content loads above it.
However, Scroll Anchoring is not perfect. On certain complex web applications, infinite-scrolling feeds, or poorly coded forums, Scroll Anchoring can actually cause the page to misbehave, creating artificial stutter, locking you in place when you are trying to scroll up, or skipping over sections of text entirely. If a specific web application you rely on is breaking because of Chrome’s anchor attempts, you can disable the feature entirely.
How to Turn Off Scroll Anchoring in Google Chrome
You can disable the anchoring engine by modifying Chrome’s hidden experimental flags.
- Open the Google Chrome browser.
- Click inside the address bar at the top of the screen.
- Type the following exact command and press Enter:
chrome://flags/#enable-scroll-anchoring - The browser will load the Experiments page, automatically scrolling down to highlight the Scroll Anchoring setting in yellow.
- Click the drop-down menu on the right side of the highlighted setting (which currently says “Default”).
- Select Disabled from the drop-down list.
- A large blue Relaunch button will appear at the bottom right of the window. Click it to restart Chrome.
Chrome will now render web pages exactly as they load. If an element loads above your current viewport, the page will shift normally. This eliminates the stuttering and scrolling glitches caused by the anchoring engine failing on poorly optimized websites, restoring raw, predictable scrolling behavior.