How to get consistent ScrollIntoView behavior

Question

So I have been using ScrollIntoView() to jump to anchors in a react component as part of a web app. For small pages, it works fine, goes to the right spot and behaves as one would expect. I have one larger page where the behavior is strange. On loading, the jump to anchor is below where it should be by half a page or more. The first time one clicks on a link to any anchor, including the same anchor, the anchor ends up above where it should be by a similar amount. Every subsequent click after that works perfectly as long as the page is not reloaded. Here is my code for the function. It has a setTimeout because I thought that the problem had something to do with the page loading, but there is no effect. Here is my function:

scrollToAnchor: function () {
    let anchorName = this.props.location.hash || window.location.hash;
    if (anchorName) {
        anchorName = anchorName.replace("#", "");
        let anchorElement = document.getElementById(anchorName);
        if (anchorElement) {
            window.setTimeout(anchorElement.scrollIntoView(true), 0);
        }
    } else  {
        window.scrollTo(0, 0);
    }
},

Answer 1

In my case, I had to add the default params manually in order for it to work in some browsers. The block and inline params have an associated default value, but I had to put them in manually like this:

my_element.scrollIntoView(
   { behavior: 'smooth' , block: 'start', inline: 'nearest'}
);

Once I defined them in the scrollIntoViewOptions, it worked fine across all browsers.

PS: don't forget the polyfill for smooth scrolling.