Media queries are a great tool for changing a website’s layout depending on parameters like viewport width, but it can be very annoying when browsers do not do the same thing. An obvious example is whether or not a vertical scrollbar, should one exist, is included when the viewport’s width is calculated.
I made a note about this two years ago in Media queries, viewport width, scrollbars, and WebKit browsers. In that post I also pointed to the following statement in the Media Queries specification:
The ‘width’ media feature describes the width of the targeted display area of the output device. For continuous media, this is the width of the viewport (as described by CSS2, section 9.1.1 [CSS21]) including the size of a rendered scroll bar (if any).
So it’s pretty clear what browsers are supposed to do. But in reality this varies. It doesn’t just depend on the browser and operating system but also on user settings. To find out what current browsers do, I created a simple Media Query width test document with a number of breakpoints and opened it in a lot of browsers.
I saw three different behaviours.
Copyright © Roger Johansson
