Future versions of the Firefox browser will support a feature that will stabilize the browser window and prevent pages from moving as they load. This happens when images and ads load at the top of the page and push the content you're viewing down and out of view.
The feature is known as “scroll anchoring” and is rumored to be the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the official body for web specifications.
Changes to the page's [DOM] elements above the visible area of a scroll box can result in the page moving while the user is in the middle of “loading” the content. This feature proposes a mechanism to mitigate this unpleasant user experience by tracking the position of an anchor node and adjusting the scroll offset accordingly.
The first browser to add support for scroll anchoring and the team of developers who started the work via API is Google Chrome. Work on adding “scroll anchoring” to Chrome began in March 2016, after users complained about the problem a year earlier, and the feature, which was made available with Chrome 56, was released in January 2017.
Opera Software added support a month later, with the release of Opera 43, while Baidu's browser followed in April of that year. Edge ,Safari, and Internet Explorer never released support for scroll anchoring.
Now, nearly two years after Chrome to stabilize the page loading experience by eliminating unnecessary position shifts, the feature is finally being added to Firefox.
According to a tweet from Mozilla developers today, work on adding support for scroll anchoring to Firefox has finally been completed after initial efforts began in September 2016.
The current Firefox Nightly build released today supports scroll anchoring, and the feature is expected to be released with the official release of Firefox 66 in March 2019.
