Notebook scrolling jumps

Support
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1

User reports:

I would like to report an issue I have been encountering for a while. Briefly, the issue is that scrolling up in a Jupyter notebook on the Fornax Science Console results in very obnoxious skipping behavior. The issue is worst in Firefox and is still present (but less egregious) in Safari.

An example screen recording of the skipping behavior is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OzZx0GCgZjQLh7WyXpSrJ4_NW073AaQ3/view?usp=sharing

Details:

  • date and time: 2025 June 30, 3:00 PM EDT
  • web browser: Firefox 140.0.2 (build 20250627085530)
  • where in the Fornax Science Console this happened: while running a notebook in JupyterHub
  • what you were doing when the problem occurred: trying to scroll up in the notebook
  • what you expected to have happen: the notebook should have scrolled up smoothly
  • what happened instead: the screen kept skipping back down to the bottom repeatedly, refusing to scroll upward
  • include any errors messages or info that were produced: N/A
  • please include any additional information you feel is relevant: the behavior is repeatable, it happens every time. It is unique to Jupyterhub on the Fornax Science Console. The same notebooks in Jupyterhub in the same browser run locally on my laptop without issues. I have verified that the issue occurs whether or not there are rendered matplotlib figures (I’m aware MPL figures cause other issues with jupyterhub). The issue happens regardless of the Fornax Science Console environment being used. It only happens when scrolling up; scrolling down works just fine. I’m scrolling using my MacBook’s track pad with two-finger swipe. I have not attempted to replicate the behavior using a separate mouse with a scroll wheel. However, when clicking the scroll bar and dragging upward to scroll, it does skip, but not as badly as when trying to swipe to scroll.
2

It looks like this caused by the jupyterlab-myst extension. See for example this issue.

We will explore removing that extension in the next round of software update. In the mean time, if you run the following in the terminal and reload the browser page, it should fix it.

/opt/conda/bin/pip uninstall jupyterlab-myst

Unfortunately, you may have to do that whenever you start a new session until the software is updated in the next a few weeks.

3

It might be worth checking to see if this could be a settings problem. When I did the following, it solved all kinds of problems in the screen display for me.

try settings…settings editor… notebook settings.. then scroll down to ‘windowing mode’ and change this to be anything other than ‘full’

1 Like
4

Thanks @jkrick. I can confirm that changing the window mode also solves the issue.

This is a better solution since the setting change persists between sessions.

5

We will explore removing that extension in the next round of software update. In the mean time, if you run the following in the terminal and reload the browser page, it should fix it.

please keep the extension, as the notebooks start to use more of the myst features they won’t show properly in jupterlab without the extension.

In the meantime we could document the windowing workaround, or could comment in the tracking issue you already linked above.

(otherwise I fully agree that this is an extremely annoying problem)