Updating URL Anchor Reference Without Jumping to the Anchor

Is it possible with javascript to update the anchor in the current url without causing the page to jump to that anchor.

In otherwords, I need to be able to create a link to mypage.html#anchor1 such that the url bar changes to that when you click the link but the page doesn't actually scroll to that anchor.

The anchor needs to exist in the HTML, so simply removing it isn't acceptable.

I've tried removing the anchor element from the DOM onload but it seems that the browser caches it and continues to scroll to it when linked to even after it is gone.

Is there possibly another way to block the automatic page scrolling that actually works?

Oh and before people start lecturing about expected browser behavior, the reason I am doing this is because I have implemented dynamic tabs with javascript that pull several sections into a tabbed interface and I'm using the anchors to reference the different sections so that they can be loaded initially if a user links directly to that section. This allows it to degrade gracefully if there is no javascript because the links then jump to the actual section on the page as they will be laid out vertically without javascript rather than broken up into tabs.

It all works great except that the browser always jumps to the top of the content section when changing tabs because the anchor tag for the selected block is there. It would be much better if the page wouldn't jump around when changing tabs.Start Free Trial