Horizontal scrollbars in MeFi?

May 10, 2005 3:35 PM

It's been a long time now that I get horizontal scrollbars (screenshot) in all the MeFi pages I visit. Why is that?
posted by kchristidis to Bugs at 3:35 PM (22 comments total)

(A query for "horizontall scroll" gave me no results - sorry if this is a double post.)

I'm using Firefox 1.03 - WinXP Pro.

Thanks for your help in advance.
posted by kchristidis at 3:35 PM on May 10, 2005

I get them too - in MeFi only, not MeTa or AskMe. Also FireFox 1.03.XP Pro.
posted by dg at 3:39 PM on May 10, 2005

Yea me too. Both in Firefox and Mozilla 1.7.7. Not in IE though. Running XP SP1
posted by octothorpe at 3:58 PM on May 10, 2005

Glad to see I'm not the only one affected.

Let's hope Matt knows what causes this bug.
posted by kchristidis at 4:00 PM on May 10, 2005

is it to make room for the sidebar/textads?
posted by amberglow at 4:18 PM on May 10, 2005

I get it too, in Firefox OS 10.3.9. But it's not that big of a deal, is it? Mine only moves a fraction of a centimeter, so it's not like I'm scrolling for text. amberglow - nope, it's just a few pixels, so it's not that our window isn't big enough.
posted by fionab at 4:31 PM on May 10, 2005

Yeah, only moves a pixel or so to me too.

(But it's a bit annoying if you ask me.)
posted by kchristidis at 4:37 PM on May 10, 2005

Stupid question time: do these scrollbars persist if you, y'know, widen your browser window by some margin?
posted by cortex at 4:39 PM on May 10, 2005

Cortex, yes, of course! ;)
posted by kchristidis at 4:43 PM on May 10, 2005

Yes for me - they stay the same, in that the scroll bar moves the window contents the same amount of space sideways, no matter the resolution (usually 1024 x 768) or window size.
posted by dg at 4:45 PM on May 10, 2005

Just to make myself clear on my previous post (it sounds like I found the solution to the problem), I mean: yes, they persist.
posted by kchristidis at 4:45 PM on May 10, 2005

It looks like it's the time on the olive green bar right below "Community Blog". Remove this object in FFx and the scroll bar goes away.
posted by boo_radley at 4:55 PM on May 10, 2005

This is a CSS hack that is usually required so that content does not shift around in Firefox (or other standard's based browsers) when a side scrollbar is required on the page. At least, that's what I'm guessing.
posted by purephase at 6:44 PM on May 10, 2005

Is anyone using MetaPhilthy? This started for me after I installed it.
posted by sugarfish at 7:34 PM on May 10, 2005

it's the text of the time, as boo_radley said. it's aligned to far right and busts the page width. Not using metaphilthy (anymore) and I'm utterly confused by purephases comment.
posted by puke & cry at 8:29 PM on May 10, 2005

Sugarfish, nope.
posted by kchristidis at 8:30 PM on May 10, 2005

I get this randomly no matter what kind of page I'm viewing. Sometimes it happens on MeFi, sometimes it happens on my Yahoo Inbox, sometimes it happens it happens on a Livejournal page - it's all over the place. It only started happening after I started using Firefox as my default browser. I've tried looking at all of the settings to fix it, but haven't had any luck.
posted by MsVader at 12:07 PM on May 11, 2005

kchristidis - If WinXP Pro + Firefox, why the OSX-style scrollbars in that screen grab?

I use FF 1.0X and XP Pro, no horizontal scrollbars for me on MeTa anyway. They're there in all their scrolly glory on MeFi proper.
posted by caution live frogs at 1:53 PM on May 11, 2005

It's either a border or margin miscalculation. IE will absorb these sorts of things into the box object whereas Gecko browsers will (correctly) force the horizontal scroll to accommodate what the CSS specifies. I'm too damned lazy to figure out Matt's CSS but I've run into this several times in my own designing and it always ends up with me not including the width of my borders when calculating margins for offsets on floated elements.

The problem is only present for me when not logged in (FF1.03 XP & Gentoo), hence my guess that the problem crops up somewhere in the markup/CSS related to the advertising.
posted by Fezboy! at 2:36 PM on May 11, 2005

Have you tried turning off your GUI enhancements? That affected browsing for me.
posted by Dean Keaton at 8:48 PM on May 11, 2005

caution live frogs, just a theme I'm using, obviously.

Dean, the GUI enhancements have absolutely nothing to do with the scrollbar issue - I've "enhanced" the GUI yesterday, the scrollbar has been with me for months.
posted by kchristidis at 2:28 AM on May 12, 2005

And just to make myself clear - I don't see them in MeTa too.

I only see them in all the MeFi (blue) pages.
posted by kchristidis at 2:30 AM on May 12, 2005