How to get and set the current web page scroll position?

Question

You're looking for the document.documentElement.scrollTop property.

The currently accepted answer is incorrect - document.documentElement.scrollTop always returns 0 on Chrome. This is because WebKit uses body for keeping track of scrolling, whereas Firefox and IE use html.

To get the current position, you want:

document.documentElement.scrollTop || document.body.scrollTop

You can set the current position to 1000px down the page like so:

document.documentElement.scrollTop = document.body.scrollTop = 1000;

Or, using jQuery (animate it while you're at it!):

$("html, body").animate({ scrollTop: "1000px" });

Update 2021: browsers inconsistencies regarding X/Y scroll amount seem to have disappeared, but I still use the solution in this answer whenever I need to.

There are some inconsistencies in how browsers expose the current window scrolling coordinates. Google Chrome on Mac and iOS seems to always return 0 when using document.documentElement.scrollTop or jQuery's $(window).scrollTop().

However, it works consistently with:

// horizontal scrolling amount
window.pageXOffset

// vertical scrolling amount
window.pageYOffset

I went with the HTML5 local storage solution... All my links call a function which sets this before changing window.location:

localStorage.topper = document.body.scrollTop;

and each page has this in the body's onLoad:

  if(localStorage.topper > 0){ 
    window.scrollTo(0,localStorage.topper);
  }