How to Enable Scroll Anchoring in Chrome to Prevent Page Jumps

By enabling Scroll Anchoring, you can prevent those annoying page jumps that happen when you’re trying to tap on something in Chrome.

A huge complaint that I see about Chrome, and other mobile browsers, is when content and links jump around on the screen when you’re trying to tap on it. This happens because of the way websites are rendered on the screen. Elements of a website, like ads and sometimes images, either load in after the rest of the page on purpose or it happens because your connection to the internet is slow.

So you start seeing content and then scroll down, attempt to tap on a link but then have an image or ad load that makes the whole page jump around.

This can cause your tap to miss entirely, it could cause you to tap on some random image, and it can sometimes cause you to tap on some banner ad that you never intended on doing. It’s an incredibly annoying issue when browsing websites on a mobile device and it has caused a lot of people to install ad blocking software to prevent the issue. Thankfully, Google is aware of this issue with Chrome and they did something about it.

However, it’s only available as a chrome://flags feature so we have to manually enable it by following the steps below.

Enable Scroll Anchoring in Chrome

1. Launch the Chrome application
2. Then enter the following into the Address Bar. . .
3. chrome://flags/#enable-scroll-anchoring
4. . . .and press the enter button to go to this URL
5. The Scroll Anchoring option should be highlighted at the top
6. Tap on the drop down menu for this feature
7. Tap on the Enable option
8. Then tap on the Relaunch Now button that appears at the bottom

Explanation

I do want to point out that this feature is hidden away in the chrome://flags section because it is in its early stages of development. If it gets optimized properly, we could see this feature enabled by default in Chrome and then removed entirely from this secret options area. Or, we could see it enabled by default in a future version of Chrome, but still given the ability to disable it if we chose to do so. It will just depend on what Google decides to do with this feature.

So to start, you’ll need to launch the Chrome application and then tap on the Address Bar so that you can start typing in a URL. You want to type in (or paste in) the chrome://flags/#enable-scroll-anchoring URL so that we’re not only taken to the chrome://flags section, but also taken directly to where this feature is located. If done correctly, you should see the Screen Anchoring feature in Chrome sitting right at the top fo the screen.

Tapping on the drop down menu for this particular feature will bring up a pop-up menu where you can choose between three options. This feature is set to Default by default, but you can go in here and change this to Enable or Disable at any time. Once you choose a different option that what was highlighted before, you should get a prompt at the bottom of the screen to relaunch Chrome so that the changes will take effect. Tapping on the button here will relaunch Chrome for you so you don’t have to do it manually.

Once Chrome has been relaunched, you can see Chrome’s Screen Anchoring feature is set to Enabled still and the feature will be turned on. Now, when you go to a website there shouldn’t be any jumps or skips on the screen even if some elements of the page have loaded in after you have started scrolling through it. Remember, this is still in its early stages and Google actually asks that you report any websites that still have a skipping and jumping issue when this feature is enabled.

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