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
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

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!