The improvement is available for now only for the Beta

Feb 3, 2016 09:10 GMT  ·  By

The Google Chrome developers have released a new Beta version of their Internet browser, and they've added a lot of changes and improvements, including smooth scrolling.

Some of you might have noticed that Google Chrome doesn't have smooth scrolling. This can be easily noticed especially if you spend a lot of time in the browser, and you have to do a lot of scrolling. This kind of feature is already present in Firefox, where ironically there are already add-ons disabling this function.

In any case, it took the Google Chrome developers a long time to get this working, but most likely it wasn't something intentional. It wasn't high on the list of things to do for Google Chrome, but its time has finally come.

Google Chrome 49 Beta is a big release

Developers have posted a lengthy changelog for the latest Beta of the Internet browser, and there is a lot of stuff for devs. Most of the stuff is not immediately relevant for users, but one of the entries is really interesting.

"The most important rule with smooth scrolling is that the scrolling must still feel very snappy. If scrolling lags input by very much, people will be angry at how you've slowed down their browser and made it less responsive. This frequently leads to the naive assumption that smooth scrolling is inherently sluggish and horrible, and, therefore, should never be provided without a switch to disable it," Google developer wrote on Google+.

This feature is now available in Google Chrome Beta, which means that if you're using the stable channel, you will have to wait until it is made available. In the meantime, if you want to give the Beta channel a try, you can download the latest version of the browser from Softpedia. It can be installed alongside the stable branch, so that won't be an issue.

Google Chrome 49 Beta.