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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?

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Sure, but then it makes the scroll bar position inaccurate. The whitespace needs to go beyond the end of the scroll bar.

Does it? If you can scroll further with the keyboard than the scrollbar can indicate, that would also make the scrollbar inaccurate. Perhaps instead we could add an indicator to the scrollbar (ala Chrome's text search indicators) that shows where the content actually ends.

Why not just make the scrollbar take the extra whitespace into account as if it's part of the webpage?

This is exactly what Scintilla (editing component) does if you enable that feature.

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