Enable smooth scrolling in Google Chrome

By | May 19, 2013

Firefox by default has smooth scrolling enabled on Ubuntu. With smooth scrolling, if you turn the mouse wheel, the page scrolls by some percentage not in a single moment, but taking some time like an animation. It gives a similar effect as if the page is being scrolled by fingers on a touch device.

Google chrome does not yet have a direct setting to enable/disable smooth scrolling. However the setting is hidden inside. To access the setting, open the following url in your chrome browser.

chrome://flags

A page would open up with the title "Careful, these experiments may bite". On this page, google chrome's hidden settings can be configured. These are kept hidden because they are in experimental stage are not yet fully tested to be stable across all platforms. But still if some one wants to try them out, its there.

Now search using Ctrl+F for "smooth scrolling". 2 entries would be visible.

Threaded compositing Mac, Windows, Linux
Uses a secondary thread to perform web page compositing. This allows smooth scrolling, even when the main thread is unresponsive.

and

Smooth Scrolling Windows, Linux
Enable the experimental smooth scrolling implementation.

Enable both of them. Then click "Relaunch Now" button at the bottom of the page to restart chrome. After restarting you should notice the scrolling to be slightly more smoother. I noticed that firefox scrolling is much smoother compared to chrome. However chrome too does the work well.

About Silver Moon

A Tech Enthusiast, Blogger, Linux Fan and a Software Developer. Writes about Computer hardware, Linux and Open Source software and coding in Python, Php and Javascript. He can be reached at [email protected].

2 Comments

Enable smooth scrolling in Google Chrome

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *