Scroll smoothly to specific element on page

Question

I want to have 4 buttons/links on the beginning of the page, and under them the content.

On the buttons I put this code:

<a href="#idElement1">Scroll to element 1</a>
<a href="#idElement2">Scroll to element 2</a>
<a href="#idElement3">Scroll to element 3</a>
<a href="#idElement4">Scroll to element 4</a>

And under links there will be content:

<h2 id="idElement1">Element1</h2>
content....
<h2 id="idElement2">Element2</h2>
content....
<h2 id="idElement3">Element3</h2>
content....
<h2 id="idElement4">Element4</h2>
content....

It is working now, but cannot make it look more smooth.

I used this code, but cannot get it to work.

$('html, body').animate({
    scrollTop: $("#elementID").offset().top
}, 2000);

Any suggestions? Thank you.

Edit: and the fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/WxJLx/2/

Answer 1

Super smoothly with requestAnimationFrame

For smoothly rendered scrolling animation one could use window.requestAnimationFrame() which performs better with rendering than regular setTimeout() solutions.

A basic example looks like this. Function step is called for browser's every animation frame and allows for better time management of repaints, and thus increasing performance.

function doScrolling(elementY, duration) { 
  var startingY = window.pageYOffset;
  var diff = elementY - startingY;
  var start;

  // Bootstrap our animation - it will get called right before next frame shall be rendered.
  window.requestAnimationFrame(function step(timestamp) {
    if (!start) start = timestamp;
    // Elapsed milliseconds since start of scrolling.
    var time = timestamp - start;
    // Get percent of completion in range [0, 1].
    var percent = Math.min(time / duration, 1);

    window.scrollTo(0, startingY + diff * percent);

    // Proceed with animation as long as we wanted it to.
    if (time < duration) {
      window.requestAnimationFrame(step);
    }
  })
}

For element's Y position use functions in other answers or the one in my below-mentioned fiddle.

I set up a bit more sophisticated function with easing support and proper scrolling to bottom-most elements: https://jsfiddle.net/s61x7c4e/