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by rohansingh 2116 days ago
Nothing to see here:

  Thought it was a bug but it's just a feature difference between browsers.
  
  The first time the page loads with an anchor in the url: `http://somesite.com/#gohere` it should load and go to that location on the page.
  
  But if you scroll to the bottom for example, then reload the page or put the cursor in the URL bar and press "Return/Enter"... the page will simply reload exactly where you are.
3 comments

Yeah there are two competing needs here. Users expect to stay in the same location on the page if they refresh it or if they go to another page and use the back button. Users also expect that when the URL contains an anchor then they go to the location of that anchor. It's a tough issue to find the balance between these two user needs but I think the behaviour implemented by Chrome is good. These days it is very rare that a user refreshes a page, and when they do most users expect to stay in the same location on the page.
OP here. It doesn't go to 'the same location on the page', that's the problem. It always jumps to the top of the page, as if the anchor didn't exist.

Note there is, in my case, a form submit action to a hidden iframe with the reload but the page location stays put in Firefox.

I refresh pages and use enter all the time. In fact, it's a constant battle to use any modern webpage.
But if the reload is triggered by a form submit to an iframe (thus staying on the page) with a timed call to window.reload(), the page resets to the top. Not so in Firefox.
It's not a "feature difference". It's a change since it worked in a prior version of Chrome.