/til/

2025 0315 scrollbar-gutter: stable

I learned about scrollbar-gutter recently and I can’t believe it’s not the default. (Maybe I should make a whole series of these for CSS.)

The scrollbar-gutter CSS property allows authors to reserve space for the scrollbar, preventing unwanted layout changes as the content grows while also avoiding unnecessary visuals when scrolling isn’t needed.
scrollbar-gutter | MDN

I discovered this when I built a site with centered content. When navigating between pages, the content would shift a few pixels left/right. It took me a while to figure out that this was because some pages showed a scrollbar, and other pages didn’t.

A screen recording of the behavior

Observe the right side of this screen recording to see the scrollbar appear and disappear during navigation.

Setting scrollbar-gutter: stable fixes this behavior. Not only is this something you have to specify, but it wasn’t even available until recently; MDN indicates this is in Baseline as of December 2024. What did poor designers do in the past, I don’t even want to know.

Responses

Webmentions

Hosted on remote sites, and collected here via Webmention.io (thanks!).

Comments

Comments are hosted on this site and powered by Remark42 (thanks!).