Browser Scroll Restoration Is Broken on SPAs. Here's How a Chrome Extension Fixes It.

Chrome has had scroll restoration support since 2015. You can even control it: history.scrollRestoration = 'manual' . But if you've ever tried to reliably restore a user's position on a React or Next.js app, you know it doesn't work the way you'd expect. Here's what breaks, why it breaks, and how a browser extension can sidestep the entire problem. What the Browser Actually Does The default behavior is history.scrollRestoration = 'auto' . When you navigate back to a page, the browser tries to scroll to where you were. This works fine for static pages. It falls apart for: SPAs where content is injected into the DOM after navigation Infinite scroll pages where the content at a given Y position changes depending on what was previously loaded Lazy-loaded images that push content down after the scroll restore fires The fundamental problem: the browser fires scroll restoration when the page HTML is parsed, not when the page content is fully rendered. A React app that loads a skeleton → fetches data → renders actual content will restore scroll into a partially-rendered DOM. The history.scrollRestoration = 'manual' Trap If you set manual , you own scroll restoration completely. Most Next.js apps do this. The typical approach: // Save position before navigation router . beforeEach (( to , from ) => { savedPositions [ from . path ] = window . scrollY ; }); // Restore after navigation router . afterEach (( to ) => { const position = savedPositions [ to . path ]; if ( position !== undefined ) { nextTick (() => window . scrollTo ( 0 , position )); } }); The nextTick is the problem. It fires after the Vue/React render cycle, but before async data fetching completes. The page renders empty containers, scroll restores to Y=800, then data loads and pushes everything down. User ends up at Y=800 in a now-different page position. The correct fix is to wait until the content that was at Y=800 actually exists. There's no clean hook for this — you'd need to observe the DOM until the expec