Preventing Scroll “Bounce” with CSS

Day 25 of National Blog Posting Month #NaBloPoMo

When you scroll rapidly to the top or bottom of a webpage you might notice a “bounce” effect, where the browser momentarily allows you to scroll beyond the uppermost or lowermost point, before bouncing you to correct position.

A typical layout pattern I’ve built a few times uses grid to position a sidebar menu next to a scrollable content area. I use position: sticky so that the menu stays in view, while the main content area scrolls. Using position: sticky is handy for this, as it means the sidebar width can still be determined by the content, unlike with position: fixed.

Unfortunately this can result in an undesirable effect in some browsers when the user scrolls to the bottom — particularly if the sidebar has a different coloured background to the rest of the page, as the user will see a brief flash of the colour below below.

There’s a simple way to prevent this with css, using the overscroll-behavior property on the document root:

:root {
  overscroll-behavior: none;
}

By setting the value to none, the browser will no longer scroll beyond the top (or bottom) of the page, and your sidebar will remain fixed in place.

See the Pen overscroll-behaviour by Michelle Barker (@michellebarker) on CodePen.

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