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
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Select Dropdowns, MooTools, and CSS Print

    I know I've harped on this over and over again but it's important to enhance pages for print. You can do some things using simple CSS but today's post features MooTools and jQuery. We'll be taking the options of a SELECT element and generating...

  • By
    Sexy Opacity Animation with MooTools or jQuery

    A big part of the sexiness that is Apple software is Apple's use of opacity. Like seemingly every other Apple user interface technique, it needs to be ported to the web (</fanboy>). I've put together an example of a sexy opacity animation technique...

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!