Codebureau - Matt Simner

This had bugged me for a while.  A lot of sites (including some of the ones I develop) tend to have a fixed width layout these days and some browsers (IE particularly) 'always' has a visible scrollbar.  This means that the available screen width is constant whether the page scrolls or not. 

Firefox on the other hand (and Chrome/Opera/Safari) seem to have this off by default.  This of course seems reasonable until you have a fixed width, centred layout that 'shifts' when you switch from a non-scrolling to a scrolling page.  It's just a bit off-putting.

Fortunately Firefox is configurable and the following will fix that up for you. (I'm sure the other browsers are capable of something similar but I'm not using them much :) )

1. Find your profile directory (it's bound to be the 'default' one unless you're developing Firefox addons.  You'll normally find it in c:\documents and settings\username\application data\Mozilla\Profiles\xxxxx.default\
2. Go to the 'chrome' subfolder and create a file called userContent.css (you'll probably find there's a couple of 'example' files there already.
3. Add the following (Firefox-specfic) line to the file:
   
   html { overflow: -moz-scrollbars-vertical !important; }
   
   
4. Save the file, exit Firefox and start her up again.  You should now have a permanent scrollbar which eliminates the page shift.