Overflow:auto and scrolling on IE5 for Mac

[kelly001]

When using overflow: auto for an element inside a page, the page nonetheless becomes long enough to contain the entire content of the element, even though part of it is hidden. This causes your page to scroll down as far as where the hidden content goes. This is a known bug in IE5 for Mac and very annoying to me. Has anyone found a workaround?

thanks!

[mivox]

Have you tried either overflow: hidden or overflow: scroll (depending on which you want)?

[kelly001]

yes, hidden causes the same thing and scroll hads a horizontal and unneeded scrollbar

[kelly001]

I was wondering if anyone knew of a way in the body tag to specify based on the browser which scroll setting to apply to the page (default, auto or no)?
If you change the scroll setting in the body to "no" it will prevent the page from scrolling alltogether. This would be fine for IE5 Mac users but I don't want to impose that rule on PC users as it would be a pain not to be able to scroll the page if your screen resolution cut part of the design.

[kelly001]

F.Y.I if anyone is ever researching this bug.

No one has been able to provide a direct workaround to this problem. What you can do instead is create a different page and use an iframe instead of a div layer. iframes display perfectly in IE5 though they can be fussy and not totally supported in other browsers.

Then on your original page you just add a javascript to automatically redirect any Mac IE5.0 to the other page with the iframe. The javascript could be something like this

<script language="JavaScript">
if(navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE 5.")!=(-1)
&& navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Macintosh")!=(-1)) {
top.location.href = "new-iframe-page.html";
}
</script>

Good luck.