Firefox, long page makes page 'jump'. Why? (SCROLLBARS!)

[wrafter]

I've noticed the following problem a few times, but tonight it's causing a giant olde headache.

I have a page, which is about two screen lengths long. All pages on the site are nicely set up so that they move smoothly from one to the other, no jumping, no little pixel movements on the navigation, nothing. But this page, because it is longer than all the rest, results in Firefox making it jump to the left. A good 20 pixels it looks like. And I can't figure out the reason for it.

Has anyone encountered this before.

The problem doesn't happen in IE.

When I shorten the text on the page so that there are no scroll bars there's no problem. THE SCROLLBARS... THAT'S IT!

In IE there are scrollbars whether they are used or not, in Firefox only when they are required. Therefore it causes what looks like a jump.

Hell!

Any fix or workaround for this?! Or is this as good as it's gonna get?

M.

[tedster]

The jump occurs only while the page is being rendered, am I correct?

If so, it sounds like a common result of the way FireFox (and Opera) render pages compared to IE - doing a piece at a time and giving you at least something to look at early on, but then adjusting as needed when more data is rendered.

I'm quite used to it by now - and actually prefer this to having a long wait. And if this is what you are describing, then no, there is nothing for it.

[Robin_reala]

No, it is the scrollbars, and it's a design decision. You can (I think) put body{overflow:scroll-y;} in your CSS to force them on in Gecko at least.

[wrafter]

Now that I know it's the scrollbars it doesn't hurt so bad, but I thought it was something I was doing wrong, and the thing was beginning to drive me crazy. :)