Slashdot Mirror
Chrome Now Uses Scroll Anchoring To Prevent Those Annoying Page Jumps (techcrunch.com)
Google has updated its Chrome browser to fix the annoying page jumps that occur when pages are loading. While developers want pages to load the actual content of a page before additional ads and images appear, "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," reports TechCrunch. From the report: 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.
Does it prevent those incredibly annoying jumps that happen when a website suddenly inserts a header at the top of the page after you scroll down a few lines? Because when I see those, I usually just close the page and make a mental note to not visit that site again.
The only website I have this problem with is Slashdot, which wants to cover the top 3rd of my web browser with an ad.
It didn't work very well when I enables it in testing a few months ago, but we'll see.
Page jumps make me actually angry. It's like a book snapping shut on you mid-sentence.
Pales in comparaison to AC annoyances.
I've gotten so irritated at the damn next button being replaced with some damn link to crap. I've just started blacklisting every damn site I get sent to unfairly. But they keep changing the names of the same basic garbage.
Dynamic content - often the page doesn't know the size of the content until it's been served.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Every web browser (Pale Moon, Firefox, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi) I use does that here. It's a bug in Slashdot's scripting, not in the browsers.
An example: I was a front-end developer for the Wall Street Journal five years ago. The home page was a shifting multi-column stack of dozens of internal content modules (developed by different programmers) that had no awareness of each other (also often the case with the programmers), along with dynamic ads and an astounding amount of additional crud that included externally-sourced content like spammy Taboola and Outbrain links. To conserve bandwidth, the module containers triggered just-in-time content loading when the user scrolled down to within a certain number of pixels. There was effectively no way for any part of the page to know the position of any other part. Sure, I declared the sizes for images within my module, but it had no effect on the rest of the page.
I rarely notice this on Desktop (probably due to ad blocking), but man, I sure could use this on Mobile.
I am on Chrome 57 and I still the jumps on Slashdot whenever the IBM ad loads. I can see why Google would be concerned. I blacklisted a lot of the ad sites just because of what they did to the screen. I am sure a lot of others did the same. If people blacklist ads, this hits Google's bottom line directly.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
This jumping is because of how Google uses "first render" timing to affect pagerank. They forced developers to use stupid workarounds, and now they are solving the problem caused by the stupid workaround.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
uBlock Origin.
I stopped using Adblock+ long ago, because it makes all my web browsers consume more RAM, than when running without it.
This was solved a long time ago with Noscript. Pages load fast and don't jump, not to mention the security benefits.