Chrome now uses scroll anchoring to prevent those annoying page jumps

The latest update to Google’s Chrome browser makes mobile browsing a bit easier and (hopefully) less frustrating.

One of the most annoying things about browsing the web on a phone is that pages tend to jump while they are loading. The reasons for those jumps are pretty straightforward: developers want to make sure the actual content of a page loads first and then they load up additional ads and images. The problem is that if you’ve already scrolled down, your page resets when some off-screen ad loads and you’re suddenly looking at a completely different part of the page (and 90 percent of the time, that jump seems to happen right when you’re trying to click on a link and you somehow end up tapping on an ad…).

The latest versions of Chrome (56+) do their best to prevent these jumps with the help of a feature called scroll anchoring. Google tested scroll anchoring in the Chrome beta versions for the last year and now it’s on by default. Google says the feature currently prevents almost three jumps per page view — and, over time, that number will likely increase. It’s worth noting that the focus of this feature is on mobile, simply because the smaller screen means more content is likely to be loaded off-screen, but it’s actually now on by default on Chrome for Mac, Windows and Linux, too (as well as on Chrome OS).