Detect Browser Bars Visibility with JavaScript

By  on  

It's one thing to know about what's in the browser document, it's another to have insight as to the user's browser itself. We've gotten past detecting which browser the user is using, and we're now into knowing what pieces of the browser UI users are seeing.

Browsers provide window.personalbar, window.locationbar, and window.menubar properties, with the shape of { visible : /*boolean*/} as its value:

if(window.personalbar.visible || window.locationbar.visible || window.menubar.visible) {
  console.log("Please hide your personal, location, and menubar for maximum screen space");
}

What would you use these properties for? Maybe providing a warning to users when your web app required maximum browser space. Outside of that, these properties seem invasive. What do you think?

Recent Features

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Daniel

    I remember testing these out recently, and from memory, they don’t really do anything in most browsers (always set to true).

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!