Browsers not supporting document.documentElement.scrollLeft?

petermichaux · Sep 3, 2006

Hi,

I just tested all the browsers I have for support of
document.documentElement.scrollLeft to determine how many pixels the
window has been scrolled to the right. I'm trying to determine if I
really need to go to all the trouble of feature detection for determine
page scroll amount of if the old browsers are old enough now just to
ignore them.

Below are the OS-browser combinations that worked in my test.

OS X 10.4
Safari 2.0.4
Opera 9.00
Firefox 1.5.0.6

OS X 10.3
Safari 1.3.2
Opera 9.00
Firefox 1.5.0.6
(Failed in Internet Explorer 5.2)

Windows XP
Internet Explorer 6.0.2600.000.xpclient.010817-1148
Firefox 1.5.0.6
Opera 9.01

IE 6 was released in August 2001 which is a long time ago so worrying
about IE 5 seems unnecessary for some kinds of web sites. And IE 5 on
OS X is a tiny fraction of people surfing the web.

Does anyone know which are the most recent browsers that would not
support document.documentElement.scrollLeft? Any mobile devices or are
they all running something based on Mozilla or Opera?

Thank you,
Peter

Martin Honnen · Sep 3, 2006

I just tested all the browsers I have for support of
document.documentElement.scrollLeft to determine how many pixels the
window has been scrolled to the right.

Windows XP
Internet Explorer 6.0.2600.000.xpclient.010817-1148

Note that for IE 6 you will need to use
document.documentElement.scrollLeft if it renders the document in strict
mode but document.body.scrollLeft if it renders the document in quirks
mode. So for IE 6 and later you need to check document.compatMode to
decide whether to use documentElement.scrollLeft or body.scrollLeft. And
it seems Mozilla does the same but there I think window.pageXOffset is a
better choice anyway as I think it will work in older versions of
Mozilla too.

For IE 5 and 5.5 on Windows you need document.body.scrollLeft.

petermichaux · Sep 3, 2006

Martin said:
Note that for IE 6 you will need to use
document.documentElement.scrollLeft if it renders the document in strict
mode but document.body.scrollLeft if it renders the document in quirks
mode. So for IE 6 and later you need to check document.compatMode to
decide whether to use documentElement.scrollLeft or body.scrollLeft. And
it seems Mozilla does the same but there I think window.pageXOffset is a
better choice anyway as I think it will work in older versions of
Mozilla too.

For IE 5 and 5.5 on Windows you need document.body.scrollLeft.

Hi Martin,

Thank you for the reply. I just read the following page about quirks
mode

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html

I always have following doctype at the top of my web pages

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

so on modern browsers it seems I don't have to worry about my page
being rendered in quirks mode, correct?

So it looks and could just use documentElement.scrollLeft if I am not
concerned with IE 5, 5.5 or earlier Mozilla.

Do you have any idea which version of Mozilla was the first to
implement documentElement.scrollLeft in strict mode?

Thank you,
Peter

e.layerX problem on Macintosh browsers	18	Oct 24, 2008
HTML5 in Firefox and other browsers	1	Aug 24, 2012
How much effort to put into supporting pre-DOM browsers?	6	Mar 9, 2005
JRE in browsers	4	Mar 10, 2009
Convert ENTER to TAB in multiple browsers?	5	Aug 19, 2007
event.clientX in Safari is not like in other browsers	5	Nov 12, 2006
transparent PNG supported by most browsers?	1	Oct 17, 2011
detecting mouse click position in canvas tag has position off	0	May 28, 2006

Browsers not supporting document.documentElement.scrollLeft?

petermichaux

Martin Honnen

petermichaux

Ask a Question

Similar Threads

Members online

Forum statistics

Latest Threads