Removing the scrollbar Page Shift from Firefox

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. 

Who needs Internet Explorer when you can use it in Firefox?

I love Firefox and its addons, although I still habitually use Internet Explorer.  IE6 at work (which always provides some nice CSS challenges!) and IE7 at home.


I’m a bit slow off the mark with using firefox, but the latest addon that someone sent me yesterday may have tipped the balance.


The IE Tab addon actually uses the IE rendering engine to render in a new tab in Firefox.  It’s quite amusing when you right-click and get the IE context menu.


The really great thing about this is that you can then use the power of the other Firefox addons to develop for IE.  Here’s my list of ‘must haves’.



  • Firebug.  This is quite simply the best addon.  Hit F12 and you can instantly see (and manipulate) all sorts of things in the comfort of your own browser.
  • YSlow.  Great Javascript profiler
  • FireCookie. See and change your cookies (for development purposes of course! – Good to test the security of your apps)
  • Web Developer.  Bit of overlap with Firebug but some cool features.

The IE Developer Toolbar is still a pretty good tool, but Firebug just gives you more info when you’re debugging CSS (which is inevitable with IE).