2021 Scroll Survey Report

Here’s a common thought and question: how do browsers prioritize what they work on? We get little glimpses of it sometimes. We’re told to “star issues” in bug trackers to signal interest. We’re told to get involved in GitHub threads for spec issues. We’re told they do read the blog posts. And, sometimes, we get to see the results of surveys. Chrome ran a survey about scrolling on the web back in April and has published the results with an accompanying a blog post.

“Scrolling” is a big landscape:

From our research, these difficulties come from the multitude of use cases for scroll. When we talk about scrolling, that might include:

• Positioning elements within scrollable areas
• Infinite scroll
• Scroll linked animation
• Carousels
• Scrollview padding
• Cyclical scroll
• Virtualized scroll

According to the results, dang near half of developers are dissatisfied with scrolling on the web, so this is a metric Google devs want to change and they will prioritize it.

To add to the list above, I think even smooth scrolling is a little frustrating in how you can’t control the speed or other behaviors of it. For example, you can’t say “smooth scroll an on-page jump-down link, but don’t smooth scroll a find-on-page jump.”

And that’s not to mention scroll snapping, which is another whole thing with the occasional bug. Speaking of which, Dave had an idea on the show the other day that was pretty interesting. Now that scroll snapping is largely supported, even on desktop, and feels pretty smooth for the most part, should we start using it more liberally, like on whole page sections? Maybe even like…

/* Reset stylesheet */main, section, article, footer {
  scroll-snap-align: start;
}

I’ve certainly seen scroll snapping in more places. Like this example from Scott Jehl where he was playing with scroll snapping on fixed table headers and columns. It’s a very nice touch:

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