37567 - pref to disable position: fixed

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: CSS Parsing and Computation, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Greg Miller]

position: fixed allows web designers to recreate the most annoying aspect of
frames without actually using frames... It'd be really nice to have a pref to
treat position: fixed as position: absolute.

Comment 1

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

I vote we WONTFIX this bug. The vastly overwhelming majority of users will have
no need for such a pref.

I don't really even understand what the problem with position:fixed is, to be
honest. If this is really an issue, you could write a javascript bookmarklet
which scanned the stylesheets of the document and replaced instances of "fixed"
with "absolute". But I doubt you will ever need it.

Our prefs are overloaded as it is. We don't need more.

Comment 2

[Greg Miller]

position: fixed shrinks the scrollable area. From a user perspective, it's
annoying in exactly the same way frames are.

Comment 3

[Rich Doughty]

position: fixed isnt what you want to disable to counter frame like effects, its
overflow: (scroll|auto)

anyway, frame like layouts can be nice. the problem is that frames prevent URLs
pointing to a particular page.

anyway, there is a billion and one more annoying things you can use than
position: fixed.

i vote WONTFIX

Comment 4

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

I'm going to agree with WONTFIX here, too.  After all, if you find frames
annoying, frames are still much more common than fixed positioning.  And did I
mention we have too many prefs already?

->WONTFIX

Comment 5

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

VERIFIED WONTFIX

Comment 6

[Adam Borowski]

20 years after WONTFIXing this feature, I wonder if it'd be reasonable to reconsider. The WWW world has changed in the two decades, and today most pages consist of tens of megabytes of javascript, making once-up fixup in an extension not really workable.

Having been hit by a yet another page that has over half of the vertical screen real estate taken by an useless position:fixed header (tested only on mobile chrome?) I'd be thankful if we could make such headers scroll away.