Robert Pogson

I use thin clients. The screen passes over a network to get to me. “Smooth Scrolling” in my browser becomes “Stuttering Scrolling” because instead of jumping directly to the next view, instead of just redrawing the screen, the thin client has to redraw the screen several times. A tiny insignificant delay becomes an “in your face” nuisance.

Today, I figured out how to disable it. Google does not make it easy. There is no “settings” option to disable “smooth scrolling”.

The final clues:

• about: in the address window shows “command line” –enable-smooth-scrolling
• ps aux|grep google shows no such option on the command line
• man google-chrome (in Debian Wheezy)
  shows ~/.config/google-chrome as a directory of interest
• cd ~/.config/google-chrome;grep smooth shows Local\ State

I used vi to edit the file and blanked everything after the “:”. Stopping the browser reset the file, so I did it again. On starting the browser an error message came up but now the Local\ State file has no smooth-scrolling item.

Hallelujah! I have snappy scrolling again. Now I get to use the browser of my choice instead of opera.