Scrolling: it’s really OK to have some white space at the bottom of the window

From the comments:

This problem has been around forever, but there is a new problem that makes scrolling even worse than before. Sites which have headers or footers that have a fixed position with respect to the browser viewport completely break scrolling because when you scroll, neither the red nor the green line are visible. The green line is under the navigation junk at the top of the page.

I agree it would be great in theory... but in practice there's a HUGE problem that the author doesn't seem to have considered: many webpages have footers.

I'm talking about normally-positioned footers, not fixed-position ones.

You're not supposed to scroll beyond a footer. It would look terrible. And you don't want to put extra space between the content and the footer either, or have that space vary. (How would you even know)

So while this works great in word-processors, code editors, etc., unfortunately there's just no way to do it in browsers. Literally no way to implement it, even if the browser-makers wanted to.

An aside: it would be great if browsers somehow calculated fixed-position headers/footers and took them into account when calculating scroll distance for space-bar-scrolling...

In the early years of the web I actually threw in a raft of <br> tags at the bottom of my webpages just to counteract this problem---I've been complaining about it for upwards of fifteen years. My current solution is to put a "padding-bottom: 5in" in my #footer element, which is marginally cleaner, but of course it's specific to websites that I control....

I've had a similar gripe with scrolling, although I encountered with text editors instead of browsers. Having used Sublime Text for a while (which does what the article suggests and shows you as much white space as is needed to keep the display consistent), it is really jarring using many of the other editors which refuse to do this, especially as I often tend to write new code at the bottom of the page.

Being forced to consistently look at the bottom of my screen instead of the top or the middle is pretty annoying, maybe a change in browsers could trigger a change in text editors as well!

One of the things I like about Readability is that space bar scrolling puts a blip on the side where my eyes can see where I should continue reading. I've never used the space bar to scroll elsewhere because the behaviour's too inconsistent.

This seems like a piddling thing that belongs no where in the realm of the browser. This seems to be just about hitting page down. Which 99% of users don't do. They swipe, mouse wheel, my mom even clicks and drags the scroll bar. And for the 1% of you that this drives insane make a plugin that adds something like this to all your pages. As for anchor links you could easily add extra padding dynamically.

body{ padding-bottom:1200px; } /* rolls eyes */

Couldn't you dynamically add padding to a footer element based on the view port size, resulting in sufficient "whitespace" under your content for the browser to render as you continue to scroll?

I definitely agree with this: I am annoyed by this behavior fairly consistently. I've used some programs which do this correctly--most notably Emacs--and find it to be a much more natural way of scrolling.

However, I was under the impression that I am one of the few people that uses the space bar to scroll, so browsers would not give changes like this a high priority.

How many other people scroll this way? Do you also find the current behavior annoying, or would you find his preferred change less convenient?

Chrome 15 solved / worked around this problem by smooth scrolling whenever you page up/down. Without the instant jump, the eye can easy tell where the page is compared to where it was before.

Safari in iOS handles this nicely. You can scroll below the bottom of the page and the default grey background _behind_ the page becomes visible. Desktop browsers could also do this.

The big assumption here is that most people use the space bar to jump one page at a time while reading. For me, I typically scroll through the page a little at a time and follow along while I read. I'd be curious to know which approach is most common. I guess it wouldn't actually be that hard to collect.

This is also a problem with intra-page links to named anchors - usually browsers scroll the page so that the anchor is at the top of the window, but this does not happen if the anchor is near the bottom of the page. Very confusing.

TIL I can scroll with a space bar.

I always find it amazing how often we (Techies) think that problems we have are real problems. Is there some data, analytics from a well traveled site, that can tell us what percentage of users tend to use spacebar to scroll a web page... or use page up / down? My gut tells me it won't be a big number. If I'm right than this is only a problem for power users, who make up a small percentage of potential users / customers. Could effort be better spent, then, on something else that effects more customers?