Vertical Scrollbar leads to horizontal scrollbar

Question

My CSS looks like this:

div.SOMECLASS {
  position: absolute;
  max-height: 300px
  height: auto;
  width: auto;
  overflow: auto;
  ...
}

The div height and width scale automatically. The height has a fixed maximum though: as soon as this value is reached vertical scrollbars appear. This works all pretty swell.

Now the issue:
When the vertical scrollbar appears, it uses up around 10px of horizontal space, as the scrollbar will be placed inside the div.
However, the width is not autoscaled to allow for these additional 10-something pixels used up by the vertical scrollbars. As the horizontal width before the adding the vertical scrollbars was just exactly right for the content (as expected from the width:auto setting), the div now also displays horizontal scrollbars - to allow for the missing 10 pixels. This is silly.

• How can I avoid having these horizontal scrollbars and just autoscale the width of the div to make the vertical scrollbars fit?

If possible I am looking for a solution which does not rely on just completely disabling horizontal scrolling, as this will probably be needed at some point (i.e. for certain inputs).

Smothers

Try using overflow-y: auto instead. This will only put scrollbars vertically. – Turmeric

Answer 1

I found a solution which is working but far from perfect:

I added a padding-right : 15px to my div, to automatically grow the entire div. Now if the vertical scrollbars appear, they fit within the padding so the horizontal width is still ok.

Regretfully the padding of course also shows up when no vertical scrolling is needed, making my div just a tiny bit wider than it would have to be... :/ Well, in my eyes this is still preferable to unneeded horizontal scrollbars.

Smothers

The trouble is, 15px is not a cross-platform magic number. Some of your users will likely have very fat scrollbars, for accessibility reasons. To be really safe, unfortunately, you'll have to resort to JavaScript to find out how wide scrollbars are. – Decoteau

You're right... This problem really sums up everything that is wrong with the internet. :/ – Smothers

... well, with CSS3, anyhow. Maybe CSS4 will have ways to access more system data, in addition to the system colours that were introduced in CSS2. – Decoteau

@Michael: Do you know what Javascript (or jQuery) trick one could use to find out whether there is a scrollbar and how wide it is, so the div can be widened appropriately? – Doubles

@OsakaWebbie: It's been a while since I've had to do it, but what's worked for me are pretty much along the same lines as what's described on these pages: chris-spittles.co.uk/jquery-calculate-scrollbar-width #987437 – Decoteau

Answer 2

Just figured out a pretty passable solution (at least for my version of this problem).

I assume the issue with width: auto is that it behaves similarly to width: 100vw; the problem is that when the vertical scrollbar appears, the viewport width remains the same (despite the ~10px scrollbar), but the viewable area (as I'm calling it) is reduced by 10px.

Apparently defining width by percentage defines it in terms of this "viewable area", so changing your code to:

div.SOMECLASS {
  position: absolute;
  max-height: 300px
  height: auto;
  width: 100%;
  overflow: auto;
  ...
}

should allow the content to rescale properly!

p.s. You can also instead add overflow-x: hidden, which will stop the horizontal scrollbar from appearing, instead simply cutting ~10px off of the right side of your div when the vertical scrollbar appears.

Keldah

Just noticed this is 2 years old - hope it's useful to someone anyway! – Keldah

adding width: 100% to all my child divs removed the scroll bar :) – Sweeting

This not only fixed the problem, it gave me much more understanding into how the problem originally arose. – Exciseman

I tried out @robertking's idea then removed them gradually to know the one I really needed to apply width: 100% on. Thanks guys! – Uneventful

It was the overflow: auto that did it for me! Thank you! – Verdun

width: 100vw; was the culprit again, thanks – Prepositor

yup width: 100vw was the issue -> 100% solved it – Lithesome

Answer 3

Often setting 100vw is the problem. Just remove it and your width will be 100%, which will be what you want anyways.

Mcgovern

Answer 4

This bug (specific to Firefox) occurs even when not setting a fixed width.

For instance, if you have a vertically scrollable container div (overflow: auto;) inside a flexible wrapper div (display: inline-block;), then when you resize the window to be smaller than the content can wrap, first, a horizontal scrollbar will appear in your container div, and only after that, the flexible wrapper div will grow or eventually a secondary horizontal scrollbar will appear in your window.

The result is a useless horizontal scrollbar, that only can scroll the width of the vertical scrollbar:

In order to get rid of this issue, you could use the javascript-code from this example (tested in Firefox and Chromium):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
    <style type="text/css">
    .page {height: 200px;width: 400px;overflow: auto;background-color: #ccc;border: 5px solid #000;margin: 5px;}
    .wrapper {display: inline-block;min-width: 100%;margin: 20px;}
    .scroller {overflow: auto;max-height: 100px;background-color: #f00;}
    .content {min-height: 500px;min-width: 400px;background-color: #cfc;}
    </style>
    <div class="page">
        <div class="wrapper">
            <div class="scroller">
                <div class="content">
                    The wrapper-div should expand to fit the scroller content.
                    Reduce the browser window width, and a useless horizontal scrollbar appears.
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="page">
        <div class="wrapper">
            <div class="scroller ensure-scrollbar-width-padding">
                <div class="content">
                    But with the javascript-function, this is now fixed.
                    There is no horizontal scrollbar in the wrapper-div.
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
    <script>
    var ensureScrollbarWidthPadding = function(elem)
    {
        if(!parseInt(elem.scrollWidth) || !parseInt(elem.clientWidth) || !parseInt(elem.offsetWidth))
        {
            return; // no browser-support for this trick
        }

        var update = function()
        {
            // reset to as if not having any right-padding
            elem.style.paddingRight = '0px';

            // check if horizontal scrollbar appeared only because of the vertical scrollbar
            if(elem.scrollWidth !== elem.clientWidth)
            {
                elem.style.paddingRight = (elem.offsetWidth - elem.clientWidth) + 'px';
            }
            else
            {
                elem.style.paddingRight = '0px';
            }
        };

        window.addEventListener('resize', update, false);
        window.addEventListener('load', update, false);

        update();

        return update;
    };

    (function()
    {
        var elems = document.getElementsByClassName('ensure-scrollbar-width-padding');
        for(var i=0;i<elems.length;++i)
        {
            ensureScrollbarWidthPadding(elems[i]);
        }
    })();
    </script>
</body>
</html>

The javascript function ensureScrollbarWidthPadding dynamically adds a padding-right to the vertically scrollable container, to ensure that the horizontal scrollbar will never appear.

Maziar

Yup. Firefox bug. In my case, it is triggered when I have overflow: auto in the container div of a table that has a column with white-space: nowrap;. I have multiple tables with this, and only some of them have the horizontal scrollbar that ruins the layout. So the padding-right solution wouldn't work for me – Ean

Answer 5

I had the same issue and fixed it by setting up my CSS as follows:

* {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    box-sizing: border-box;
}

html {
    height: 100%;
}

body {
    min-height: 100%;
    width: 100%;
}

Here is also an awesome video that explains it very clearly, or the original article!

Geodesic

Answer 6

Number 1 search result on Google for my problem (similar to OP, but not the same).

Here is a common scenario for seemingly unnecessary-horizontal-scrollbar:

You have an element, say, a table, which uses auto-sizing. If the auto-sizing is done before all the rows are added, then it will not calculate enough room for a vertical-scrollbar. Doing the resize after adding rows fixed my issue -- even then, I needed a timeout

this.http.get('someEndPoint').subscribe(rows => {
  this.rowData = rows;
  setTimeout(()=>{sizeColumnsToFit()}, 50);
});

Wanton