Chrome for Android is one of the fastest and most feature-rich browsers for Android. But a persistent problem has ruined Google’s mobile browser for many users – janky scrolling. Especially since Google replaced the AOSP Browser with Chrome as the default browser on new Android devices, people have been complaining about a perceived lag when scrolling through web pages (except simple ones) or swiping and resizing. And it’s not a problem of hardware, as the old Browser was consistently performing better in this area even on two-year old devices.
Now Redditor erythrocytes64 suggested a simple tweak that actually seems to work at making Chrome for Android scroll smoother. We tried it ourselves on two devices, and the change, while not tremendous, is visible. In addition, many commenters on the Reddit thread report positive results.
Without further ado, this is what you have to do:
- Type or paste chrome://flags in the URL bar in Chrome for Android
- Find the Maximum tiles for interest area (#max-tiles-for-interest-area ) flag in the list
- From the dropdown, change from Default to 512
- Tap on the Relaunch Now button to commit the change.
What the change seems to do is allocate more RAM to Chrome for Android, and improve the scrolling speed in the process. The caveat is that, especially on devices with less RAM, other apps might be purged from memory sooner because Chrome gets more of it. If that’s an issue for you, try experimenting with different values instead of 512, e.g. 256.
Flags in Chrome (for Android and for desktop) are experimental and meant to allow advanced users to tweak things that are not quite suitable for the average user. If anything goes awry, you can always clear application data to revert to the default settings.
Head over to the original thread on Reddit for more details and a discussion on what you can do with this flag and a couple of others.
