Smooth Scrolling with MooTools Fx.SmoothScroll
I get quite a few support requests for my previous MooTools SmoothScroll article and the issue usually boils down to the fact that SmoothScroll has become Fx.SmoothScroll. Here's a simple usage of Fx.SmoothScroll.
The HTML
<a href="#contact">Contact Us</a> <!-- goes down to the contact area -->
<!-- more stuff here -->
<a name="contact" id="contact"></a>
<h2>Contact Us</h2>
<-- more stuff here -->
The only HTML requirement for Fx.SmoothScroll is that all named anchors be given an identical id attribute.
The MooTools JavaScript
new Fx.SmoothScroll({
duration: 200
},window);
Fx.SmoothScroll accepts two arguments: the area to scroll (defaults to the window) and options for the class. The default options are usually sufficient. One recommendation I do have is to make the duration quick -- no one wants to wait for the animation to finish.
Happy scrolling!
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It is very useful, thanks man ;) very good tutorials!
What is wrong with standard browser’s anchor scroll? It is faster which is surely better for UX.
@ace: I find the default browser behavior abrupt and crude. Smoothscroll is far more elegant.
…love your tuts but this one is not working in opera (at least in the latest beta, i.e. 10.52.3344) :-(
hi David, can this script be modified so that the window can be any defined div other than the browser window?
thanks, excellent site
hi, how can i scroll if i’m already using acors for ajax stuff..? i’ve seen it on other pages – they scroll without using the ancor. thx
One issue with this script is that it somewhat breaks the back button. Hitting back only changes the URL’s hash, but not the scroll position. I created a similar script a while back I called Gentle Anchors that fixes that issue, but it does have a jolt a the start of the scroll, which I may fix one day. I’m not saying mine is perfect either. Nice addition to MooTools.
@David Walsh:
Love this!
I have added an earlier version of the effect to make my anchors ‘#top’ scroll smoothly to the top of the page:
http://www.richardperkingolf.co.uk/index.aspx
However it is effecting all ‘#’ references so when you click on the accordion menu on the right it too scrolls the page to the top.
Do you know how I could edit this to only scroll to the top my ‘#top’ anchors?
@Kendall: Thanks for the info, your script does it all for me. No problems with the back button, nice and small at 5k and by editing line 34 as you suggested /#[a-zA-Z0-9:\._-]+/ to /#top/ just targets my specific anchor and doesn’t interfere with the #p7APMc1_2 anchors in my accordion.
@jorge luis: According to a post of the google-group of MooTools this is not possible as smoothScroll only targets the browser-window. You’ve got to use
fx.scrollinstead.Hello David,
I am having some problems with this. It is working fine in all other browser except IE, however for some reason the one that you have is working.
I am not sure if I am missing something. Can you please take a look at my website and let me know what is going on?
Thanks in advance!!
I got it to work, you can disgard the previous post. : )
David, in your example, you don’t need to create empty anchor tags – you can simply place the id on the element you want to target (eg. h2) and also do away with the “name” attribute.
It’s a shame you can’t apply transitions for SmoothScroll for Mootools 1.12. It was possible to do this in v1.11, and I think that was better and more flexible in that sense, than it is now :(
Hi David,
I’ve discovered a bug with Safari (at least with latest 5.0.3) that prevent your anchor matching algorithm to work.
To see the bug simply put your demo page inside a folder with a space (or other url special chars) into the name: in those cases, Safari report links.href in url-encoded format but location.href in plain string format so the match never occurs.
For example: with a file testsmoothscroll.html inside a folder “spaced name folder”
links.href = file:///spaced%20name%20folder/testsmoothscroll.html
location.href = file:///spaced name folder/testsmoothscroll.html
Bye.
I give up. Wrapping my code in the specified code tag or otherwise does not seem to work for me.
Hi David,
I’m having a slight issue with the script. It works beautifully until spaces are introduced into the anchor then it switches to the browsers default method. Any idea of a work around for this? I’m generating my anchor id from the title of wordpress blog posts so occasionally there’ll be a space in there.
is there a jquery version of this effect…