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!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Font Replacement Using Cufón

    We all know about the big font replacement methods. sIFR's big. Image font replacement has gained some steam. Not too many people know about a great project named Cufón though. Cufón uses a unique blend of a proprietary font generator tool...

  • By
    Build a Calendar Using PHP, XHTML, and CSS

    One of the website features my customers love to provider their web users is an online dynamic calendar. An online calendar can be used for events, upcoming product specials, memos, and anything else you can think of. I've taken some time to completely...

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!