Useful Firefox Hack
I've been tripped up by Firefox's vertical scrollbar more than once, and each time for the same reason. I always seem to notice this problem when I'm concurrently having trouble making a page layout line up correctly. One page will have enough contents for a text overflow, causing the vertical scrollbar to appear; click a link on that page, and a page with fewer words makes the scrollbar disappear.
Of course, I'm never actually looking at the scrollbar when this happens—it's definitely in the periphery. I'll be staring at the border of a large element in the page, trying to figure out why in tarnation it jumps 12-or-so-pixels to the right after I click a link. Five minutes later, I'll realize that I've actually fixed all of the layout bugs in the page, and I'm simply being fooled by the magically disappearing scrollbar.
I figured there would be an about:config setting to change this, but I could find nothing on Google. Finally, I found this tip, indicating that a simple change to Firefox's userContent.css could do exactly what I wanted: make the stupid scrollbar appear all the time.
Here's the snippet, which should have been obvious to me as a wanna-be CSS buff:
html {overflow-y: scroll;}
The default value of this property is auto This causes a scrollbar to appear only when it is required to. Overriding this default at the <html> level makes every page have an implicit vertical scrollbar. Why this isn't the default, I don't know... but I'm glad to have figured out how to fix it.
