Why is preserving browser scroll position not a solved problem?

Post date: 2026-04-08 19:20:46

You swipe right, but instead of returning to your last position on the previous page you get kicked up to the top. A minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, though I'm curious why such a frequently noted issue (based on a quick google) is so difficult to solve. The desktop version of this NASA site is prompting the question. NY Times on mobile Safari is a big offender too... though occasionally it isn't. Why?

I've gleaned that sometimes the problem is a browser will try to restore the scroll position before a page re-renders, so it just defaults to the top. So why not make browsers wait a fraction of a second to do this? It's not like the page will be usable until the content has loaded anyway, right? So what's the rush? I know infinite scroll pages are a particular problem, but more often I see this issue on regular web pages. And lots of infinite scroll sites (Reddit for example) don't have this issue. Are there other difficulties that the people who develop browsers or create web frameworks or build websites face when it comes to this function working reliably?

And in the case of that NASA site, a minor secondary question is why does it even need to reload at all when I navigate between pages? The site doesn't seem to place any big memory demands on the browser, there aren't any ads, the image thumbnails aren't huge assets, they aren't infinite-scroll pages, and the pages don't seem to have any dynamic content — especially compared to something like the NY Times, which doesn't need to reload pages at all when I navigate between them (but only on the desktop site).

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