15 Apr 2008

Missing Scrollbars In Mac Firefox 3

Thanks to twistedonion on MetaFilter I was alerted to an odd quirk which can result in Firefox 3 for OS X losing its scrollbars, making ‘below the fold’ content inaccessible.

After some investigation it turns out that any page containing

<meta http-equiv="msthemecompatible" content="no" />

triggers this problem. It may get fixed before Firefox 3 gets out of beta, but if you’ve ever used that tag (it makes IE render form elements in a more neutral way) you’ll want to either remove it or keep an eye on the situation.

Tuesday, 15th April 2008, 11:20am GMT

Filed under: Client-side Coding, Hints and Tips, Web

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Comments

It might be more than that...I'm running FF3b4 on Tiger and don't have scollbars on any site (including this one, and I checked your source to see if you have that meta tag on here). It took me a while to notice since I'm used to scrolling with mighty mouse or mouse actions. I haven't gone through to test which extension is causing it, but I am forcing non-compatible extensions to run (can't be on the internet without blocksite running!) I'll post back after I figure it out, seeing as SEO puts you on top of google for this problem.

— dino, 17th Apr, 3:24pm

AHA: it was the Proto skin for OS X. The problem went away when I upgraded to FF3b5, but then I got an annoying bug where the back and forward buttons acted as if I was right clicking. Re-uninstalling Proto fixed it and some other bugs that were pissing me off.
I then did a google search to find a page with the offending tag and chose http://www.canadiankettlebellmag.c… (who knows what the heck they're talking about?). I was unable to replicate the no scrollbars bug, and had them running just fine. Might want to see if you have proto installed (happened even when it wasn't running).

— Dino, 17th Apr, 4:52pm

I only had the Web Developer toolbar and uninstalling it doesn't seem to have made any difference. It's possible there's a problem caused by a previously-installed plugin, or by me running both FF2 and FF3.
Your example page has the tag commented out, I don't know if that's something they've just done.

— Matt Round, 17th Apr, 5:12pm

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Missing Scrollbars In Mac Firefox 3

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