Firefox will finally fix annoying page jumps
Future versions of the Firefox browser will support a feature that will stabilize the browser window and block those annoying page jumps that happen when images and ads are being loaded in an upper section of the page, and which push the currently viewed content down and out of view.
The feature is known as "scroll anchoring" and is described in a web standard that is still in the works at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the official web standards body.
Changes in [page] DOM elements above the visible region of a scrolling box can result in the page moving while the user is in the middle of consuming the content. This spec proposes a mechanism to mitigate this jarring user experience by keeping track of the position of an anchor node and adjusting the scroll offset accordingly.
The first browser to add support for scroll anchoring, and the dev team who pioneered the work on the API, is Google Chrome. Work on adding scroll anchoring to Chrome started in March 2016, after users complained about the issue a year earlier, and the feature shipped with Chrome 56, released in January 2017.
Opera Software added support a month later, with the release of Opera 43, while the Baidu Browser followed suit in April of the same year. Edge, Safari, and Internet Explorer never shipped support for scroll anchoring.
Now, almost two years after Chrome's original efforts to stabilize the page loading experience by eliminating unneeded scroll position yanks, the feature is finally being added to Firefox.
According to a tweet from Mozilla developers today, work on adding support for scroll anchoring in Firefox has finally completed after initial efforts began back in September 2016.
The current version of Firefox Nightly released today supports scroll anchoring, and the feature is expected to ship with the official release of the Firefox 66 stable branch in March 2019.
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