Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Detect CSS Overflow Elements

By  on  

Every once in a while you encounter a CSS annoyance that takes some cleverness to discover. One such case rears its ugly head in unwanted and unexpected scrollbars. When I see unwanted scrollbars, I usually open developer tools, click the element inspector, and hover around until I find the villainous HTML element. As a visual person, I find that process effective but not efficient. Recently I was made aware of a programmatic way to find the scoundrel element with JavaScript!

To find the element summoning demon scrollbars, you can use the following JavaScript:

document.querySelectorAll('*').forEach(el => {
  if (el.offsetWidth > document.documentElement.offsetWidth) {
      console.log('Found the worst element ever: ', el);
  }
});

After the element has been logged to the console, you can pinpoint it and play with punishments in the element inspector as you see fit.

I'm always guilty of reverting to my old ways, i.e. visual inspection, but having a programmatic solution is so much faster and convenient!

Website performance monitoring
Website performance monitoring
Website performance monitoring
Website performance monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools: Set Style Per Media

    I'd bet one of the most used MooTools methods is the setStyle() method, which allows you to set CSS style declarations for an element. One of the limitations of MooTools' setStyle() method is that it sets the specific style for all medias.

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ScrollSpy

    I've been excited to release this plugin for a long time. MooTools ScrollSpy is a unique but simple MooTools plugin that listens to page scrolling and fires events based on where the user has scrolled to in the page. Now you can fire specific...

Discussion

  1. Craig

    Great little script… To make it easy to use, I ended up creating a Bookmarklet with a slightly modified version of that script. Then I can run it easily on any page.

  2. Gregor

    Firefox Developer edition (not sure about the normal one) also has an indicator on the HTML element that is causing the overflow

  3. Sagive

    Still didn’t help me to find the colporate for some reason… also tried the * {border: 1px solid red} trick to try to identify whats happening (tears!) – ended up just overflow-x hidden – which is lazy i guess

    But.. thanks for sharing. gr8 logic that little script

    • Sean

      I’m not sure it will help in your particular case, using outline instead of border can be a good shout, it won’t add to the width of elements (when border-box is not used)

  4. Antonio

    Maybe you want to say…

    if (el.scrollWidth > document.documentElement.offsetWidth)

    Thanks for sharing

  5. Antonio

    But you must to take account of margins, etc.

  6. Antonio

    This line works better for me:

    if (el.scrollWidth > el.clientWidth)

    Detection includes cases where no scrollbar is showed but something wrong is happening.

    Thanks David for inspiring us.

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