502240 - Unnecessary horizontal scrollbars on some pages

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 446693

(Core :: Layout, defect)

Description

[Ben Lerner]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5 Ubiquity/0.1.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5

On some webpages with content that fits in the viewing space, a horizontal scrollbar appears anyway with just a smidgen of scrolling room, < 10px.  Currently, I'm seeing this behavior on slashdot.org and on http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/.  (Weirdly, I tried the same two sites in IE8, and slashdot has a scrollbar, but the nytimes site does not.)

This seems to be a regression from Fx3.0, but I don't know if it's a temporary bug in the current content on these two sites, or a change in Fx3.5.  I did confirm that the behavior appears in safe mode too, so it's not an extension problem.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

I see indeed a horizontal scrollbar on http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/ on Windows Vista.
Regression range is: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?startdate=2008-07-07+16%3A00%3A00&enddate=2008-07-07+20%3A00%3A00

Comment 2

[philippe (part-time)]

You see that with that toolbar displayed at the top, right ? It is not really a bug :-)

For Gecko 1.9.1 (Fx 3.5) (and the same happens with WebKit builds - Safari 4), they use the box-shadow property (thanks Ria for the pushlog change).

That makes this a dupe of bug 446693.

Comment 3

[Ben Lerner]

I don't think that explains the slashdot breakage -- I don't see any corresponding usage of box-shadow there...?

In either case, there's either a bug in Gecko 1.9.1, or this bug should be refiled as 'broken website'

Comment 4

[philippe (part-time)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I don't think that explains the slashdot breakage -- I don't see any
> corresponding usage of box-shadow there...?
> 
> In either case, there's either a bug in Gecko 1.9.1, or this bug should be
> refiled as 'broken website'
The slashdot.org is certainly a different issue (one issue per bug please).
Note that I see that one scrollbar issue on Gecko 1.9.0 (fx 3), Gecko 1.9.1 and 1.9.2, and Safari 4.

Comment 5

[Ben Lerner]

It is one issue -- extra scrollbars for site designs that don't intend them.  It just may happen to have multiple causes :)

FWIW, since I should have earlier -- I just checked slashdot using Chrome, and Chrome also shows a scrollbar.  So maybe this is a website bug after all.  Still, seems weird.

Thanks,