Forever growing scrollbar?



  • So, after visiting this page using Firefox, i see that the scrollbarthing keeps getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller....and smaller!!

     You can check it out here:

    http://www.iceforum.com/Page.asp?n=18644&snid=16087323&org=iceforum.com

    It doesn't happen in Internet Explorer though.

     What would cause this?



  • Opera 9.20 Linux too... It seems they have some forever repeating javascript for marquees. That could cause it. (find scrollMarque in the source).



  • It happened with SeaMonkey on Vista too, but after scrolling down (with the scroll wheel) it went away.

    After  reloading the page it didn't happen again. Weird, to say the least.



  • The marquee seems to be the cause somehow. I temporarily halted and then restarted the script without reload (using firebug on firefox 2.0.0.4) and the mysterious scrollbar behavior consequentially stopped and began again too. i don't really get [i]how[/i] the script causes the quirk though.

    Interestingly, the scrollbar behaves normal after I reload the page (like the above poster said) but the effect returns when I bypass the cache during reload. Maybe it's some obscure bug that calculates the page height wrong if certain objects aren't fully loaded yet?

    Firebug also shows no changes in the pages "height" css attributes but shows a rather insane 20.000-something "computed style" height. Makes some kind of css bug even more likely IMO.



  • Mine went away after a while. I believe it was after the full text of the marquee was in view.



  • Looks like a CSS rendering bug in the Mozilla engine. The width of the marquee text is wider than the space its displayed in. The default behaviour when floating text would be to move the content down the page below other floating areas to an area where the page is wider and it can fit. If the is a bug it may be trying to move it down the page, hence making the page longer, but it isn't getting moved and an infinite loop of making the page longer is getting generated. Very weird and probably very obscure bug in the interaction between javascript and CSS. Possibly down to the inclusion of nobr tags.



  • This effect is sometimes seen when using the "faux column" CSS technique - you set the page or column height to something silly like 20000 pixels to ensure the user will never reach the bottom.  We've found IE has a problem where it seems to try and render the whole lot, so with a huge height it can take a long time to compute some pages - a shorted (but still way off the bottom of the screen) height reduces the problem.



  • Hmm, funny. I couldn't get it to work on my Windows machine (and believe me, I spent a lot of time staring at it, waiting for it to move), but it worked perfectly on the Linux machine next to it. Same version of Firefox on both. Hmm!   


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