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
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools ContextMenu Plugin

    ContextMenu is a highly customizable, compact context menu script written with CSS, XHTML, and the MooTools JavaScript framework. ContextMenu allows you to offer stylish, functional context menus on your website. The XHTML Menu Use a list of menu items with one link per item. The...

  • By
    Editable Content Using MooTools 1.2, PHP, and MySQL

    Everybody and their aerobics instructor wants to be able to edit their own website these days. And why wouldn't they? I mean, they have a $500 budget, no HTML/CSS experience, and extraordinary expectations. Enough ranting though. Having a website that allows for...

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!