Very basic question I think. I have a website where some pages are likely to fit within the viewable vertical area of the browser, and others won't (a lot of sites must be like this).

When users browse from one page to another on the desktop browser, the vertical scroll-bar therefore appears and disappears, depending on the page. The affect, is that the nicely centered page keeps on shifting by the width of the scroll-bar when the user just selects another navigation link - what's the easiest way to stop this happening, without making all my web pages the same height?

Second part - why do desktop browser not just reserve the vertical scroll-bar area, perhaps there's a way to force them?

Very basic question I think. I have a website where some pages are likely to fit within the viewable vertical area of the browser, and others won't (a lot of sites must be like this).

When users browse from one page to another on the desktop browser, the vertical scroll-bar therefore appears and disappears, depending on the page. The affect, is that the nicely centered page keeps on shifting by the width of the scroll-bar when the user just selects another navigation link - what's the easiest way to stop this happening, without making all my web pages the same height?

Second part - why do desktop browser not just reserve the vertical scroll-bar area, perhaps there's a way to force them?

• javascript
• css

• Voting to migrate to Stackoverflow. I expect you will get an answer quickly there. – Eric Wilson Commented Sep 14, 2011 at 20:45
• Possible duplicate of How Do I Stop My Web Content From Shifting Left When The Vertical Scrollbar Appears? Roll-Up of Advice 2017 – JBH Commented Aug 5, 2017 at 17:17

2 Answers 2

This does it (doesn't work with IE6):

body { overflow-y: scroll; }

If you also want to always show the horizontal scroll bar, use this:

body { overflow: scroll; }

As for your second question, not all sites are made of fixed-width centered pages even if it became very mon. Even in this case, you've to have pages of very different lengths from click to click to be annoyed by this shift (BTW it shifts by half the width of the scrollbar ;) that's 8px on WinXP with a classic Win2k theme).

• At the beginning there was HTML pages without CSS : left-aligned (or right-aligned in hebrew and arabic languages)
• Then came gradually HTML tables on 14" CRT: each pixel was precious! (full width because 640kB is enough few imagined how it'd be displayed on 17" or 21" CRT)
• Then came fixed-width centered tables or divs: pixels were still precious on 1024px displays. With heights <768px, most pages had a fold (or were made with Flash).
• Now es CSS3 Media Queries, displays with widths from 320 to 2560px (per monitor!), progressive enhancement or graceful degradation.
• Pages like Google homepage or web apps are mon: no need for a vertical scrollbar there!

Good luck with that to establish a rule if you're a browser vendor, especially given the recent disappearing of menus, bars, etc on Chrome and then Firefox and maybe other browsers that may indicate that vendors are chasing a goal of fullscreen display (I just press F11 if I want to and want my addressbar back but that's another story :) ) and that they will likely be reluctant of "losing" 20px horizontally.

On a side note, maybe you as a developer of this site are the most annoyed by this horizontal shift because you've your site displayed all day long in front of your eyes and are accustomed at clicking precisely in this and that areas without even thinking about it anymore: you know your site as nobody else!
This won't be the case of your visitors, only few of them will see that more than twice and you've to be web fluent to know where this phenomenom es from, otherwise it's just minor annoyance like on a few other sites they visited. And you've to consider what could be most annoying for visitors:

• displaying a scrollbar that indicates at first sight that they must scroll (before they see on second sight that this vertical scrollbar is disabled so in fact there's no scroll)
• a 10px horizontal shift from time to time