Google Chrome for Android no longer has an option to disable “Pull to Refresh”. For people who don’t really like using this feature, this is pretty annoying. There was a way to disable this using a flag, but version 75 removed this flag too.
Disable Pull to Refresh Flag
Chrome for Android, until version 75 had a flag that we could use to disable the pull to refresh effect. The flag was named “Disable pull to refresh” and was available at:
chrome://flags/#disable-pull-to-refresh-effect
That removed the only way that we had to disable this feature. When I saw a very long Google discussion thread where dozens of users were complaining that the flag is no longer available, I spent a few minutes trying to find a possible workaround. However, it looks like there is no way to disable this at the moment.
A Possible Workaround
There is a new workaround, now that the old workaround is gone. At least a handful of users have reported that this works. It did not work for me though.
Set chrome://flags/#overscroll-history-navigation to disabled and restart Chrome.
The only thing that you can do at the moment is to send feedback to Google using Chrome’s built-in tool. To do this, click Menu (three dots) > Help > Report an Issue.
I will definitely update this article as soon as a method or a workaround is available to disable pull to refresh.
Why Disable? Isn’t that a Feature?
Many of you might be wondering why anyone would want to disable something that was introduced as a feature. Pull to refresh for sure makes browsing easy, in most cases. After reading through many user reports and discussion threads, these are the most popular reasons that I found users mention while trying to disable it.
- You might accidentally refresh a web form before completing it.
- Many users complain that they don’t understand when a refresh is triggered.
- There are at least a handful of users who mentioned that the refresh happens when they scroll up. I did not quite understand why this happens. But yes, this happens too.
Are you looking for a way to disable this feature too? Drop-in a comment and say hi.
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