In a react app, I have a method being called to bring a particular node into view as follows.

scrollToQuestionNode(id) {
        const element = document.getElementById(id);
        element.scrollIntoView(false);
}

The scroll happens fine, but the scroll action is a little jerky. How can I make it smooth? I don't see any options which I can give to scrollIntoView for the same.

In a react app, I have a method being called to bring a particular node into view as follows.

scrollToQuestionNode(id) {
        const element = document.getElementById(id);
        element.scrollIntoView(false);
}

The scroll happens fine, but the scroll action is a little jerky. How can I make it smooth? I don't see any options which I can give to scrollIntoView for the same.

• javascript
• css
• reactjs
• scroll

• It's now supported by Chrome (from Chrome 61) – julien_c Commented Oct 20, 2017 at 18:35

5 Answers 5

This might help.

From MDN documentation of scrollIntoView You can pass in option instead of boolean.

scrollIntoViewOptions Optional
A Boolean or an object with the following options:
{
  behavior: "auto"  | "instant" | "smooth",
  block:    "start" | "center" | "end" | "nearest",
  inline:    "start" | "center" | "end" | "nearest",
}

So you can simply pass parameter like this.

scrollToQuestionNode(id) {
  const element = document.getElementById(id);
  element.scrollIntoView({ block: 'end',  behavior: 'smooth' });
}

Reference: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/Element/scrollIntoView

For multibrowser support use the smooth-scroll-polyfill from here

For easy implementation use a wrapper like this around the polyfill so the .js polyfill method would be inizialized after loading:

https://codepen.io/diyifang/embed/MmQyoQ?height=265&theme-id=0&default-tab=js,result&embed-version=2

Now this should work cross browser:

document.querySelector('.foo').scrollIntoView({
  behavior: 'smooth'
});

Use this CSS on the div with the scrollbar:

.element-with-the-scrollbar {
  overflow-y: scroll;
  scroll-behavior: smooth;
}

This gives smooth scrolling even when you just do:

elementWithTheScrollbar.scrollTop = 0;

What saved me was applying CSS smooth behavior with JS:

document.documentElement.style.scrollBehavior = "smooth";

Just before calling the function

document.getElementById("id-name").scrollIntoView();

I don't know if this can help too but I'm working on a Vue app I had a similar need, since removing one of the last elements on a page list left blank space on the bottom (I needed to remove the blank space by scrolling down). So, the removing happens through a button function. After all's done and when it's needed, I'm targeting the last div in the list and stating

div.scrollIntoView({block: "end", behavior: "smooth"})