Google loves to sneak out new features, and it seems that is exactly what they did with Chrome 56 in January this year, and today they’ve decide to tell us about it. Meet scroll anchoring, Google’s latest web browsing enhancement to make using the web a little less infuriating.
You’ve all had page jumps, either you’ve scrolled to the content you wanted to read and some part of the webpage above where your looking, typically an image, loads and all of a sudden you page jumps up, it’s particularly infuriating on mobile where it seems perfectly timed to make me click on an advert I had no intention of interacting with. With scroll anchoring, this should mostly be a thing of the past.
Chrome will now “lock” your view at what you’re looking at so the anything happening outside your field of view no longer affects what you’re looking at. This is really one of these, wow why didn’t they do this before things. Regardless of that, I’m glad they’ve done it now. According to Google, they are now preventing about 3 jumps per page viewed, not bad.
Unfortunately, if you jump into the developer documentation there is a way for web developers to disable this functionality let’s hope no one miss uses those tools provided by Google. The feature should now be live across most platforms including Android, Chrome OS, Windows, Linux and Mac.
Oh yes I hate when that happens too. I also hate when you do a Twitter search and you’re just about to hit someone you are following only to have other names appear suddenly.
That’s a good initiative. I find it actually happens a lot on this site!