Google Chrome gets scroll anchoring

Google Chrome is a great web browser for many reasons. Like Firefox, it is a cross-platform program based on (mostly) open source technologies, but compared to Mozilla's offering, its development moves at a much faster pace. Google is constantly pushing the envelope, creating a largely positive web browsing experience.

Today, Google introduces a new Chrome web browser feature that highlights the search giant's forward-thinking. Called "scroll anchoring," it literally "anchors" the web page, preventing the page from scrolling to the top in certain circumstances. In other words, if the user is reading text on a page, it will prevent the page from shifting and interrupting the consumption. The brilliance of this feature is its overall impact -- this annoyance has probably been experienced by most, if not all, web surfers.

"Since its early days, Chrome has taken a stand against bad or abusive content. For instance, Safe Browsing warns users before they visit malicious websites, and visual indicators on tabs allow our users to quickly track down the source of unexpected noise. Similar to other features designed to protect our users from bad experiences, starting in version 56 Chrome prevents these unexpected page jumps with a new feature called scroll anchoring. This feature works by locking the scroll position on an on-screen element to keep our users in the same spot even as offscreen content continues to load," says Steve Kobes, Software Engineer, Google.

Kobes further says, "Due to the expressiveness of the web, there might be some content for which scroll anchoring is either unwanted or misbehaving. For this reason, this feature ships alongside the 'overflow-anchor' CSS property to override the functionality. To further minimize potential issues, scroll anchoring is disabled on complex interactive layouts via suppression triggers, and on back/forward navigations to allow for scroll restoration."

You can see an example of scroll anchoring in action in the above video. Not only is this frustrating for the user, but it can negatively impact the website's brand too. If it happens enough, users could avoid the site altogether, harming overall traffic. In other words, this new scroll anchoring feature will not only help media consumers, but creators too.

What do you think of this new Google Chrome feature? Tell me your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo Credit: jakkapan / Shutterstock