Position fixed on Chrome mobile causing issues when scrolling

Question

Position fixed on Chrome mobile causing issues when scrolling

5.6k Views Asked by rfgamaral At 28 April 2025 at 15:18

I've been researching this issue for the past hour and saw similar questions but I'm not sure they are the same exact problem. Probably related, somehow, but none of the answers helped me fixed my issue.

Take the following code:

<html>
    <head>
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
        <style>
            html, body {
                height: 100%;
                margin: 0;
            }

            main {
                background-color: orange;
                height: 1500px;
                margin: 50px;
            }

            footer {
                background-color: green;
                position: fixed;
                height: 50px;
                left: 100px;
                right: 100px;
                bottom: 100px;
            }
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <main></main>
        <footer></footer>
    </body>
</html>

This hard to debug because I can't seem to reproduce the problem consistently. I keep scrolling up and down - making the address bar on Chrome for Android show and hide - eventually, something like this will happen:

For some reason, the footer is being drawn in the correct place (as specified by the CSS), but Chrome dev tools detect the element in a different position (not always like the screenshot shows).

Why is this a problem?

Assume I have clickable elements inside footer, the clickable area for those elements will be in the "blue" area detected by Chrome dev tools and not where the footer is actually being drawn (the green area), as it should because that's what the user is seeing.

Thoughts?

Original Q&A

There are 1 best solutions below

**rfgamaral** · Answer 1

EDIT: I'm leaving the code below here but I found out it's not working as I expected it. It did work during my initial testing but our QA found out that it didn't actually solve the issue we were having. Right now, there's no workaround that I'm aware and we need to wait for the Chromium team to fix the issue on their end.

NON-WORKING SOLUTION

I might just have found a workaround for this Chromium bug.

I'm testing this on a Pixel 2 running the latest Chrome, not sure how nice it will work for lower end devices. It's a bit ugly but it seems to work for me.

What I did was replace the offending element with itself (forcing a browser re-layout) on the touchend event. This is perfect because the problem only exists on mobile and touchend does not exist on desktop versions.

const body = document.getElementsByTagName('body');
const button = document.getElementsByTagName('button');
const footer = document.getElementsByTagName('footer');

function randomColor() {
  button[0].style.backgroundColor =
    `hsla(${Math.random() * 360}, 100%, 50%, 1)`;
}

window.addEventListener('touchend', function() {
  body[0].replaceChild(footer[0], footer[0]);
}, false);

* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}

html,
body {
  height: 100%;
  margin: 0;
}

main {
  background-color: orange;
  height: 3000px;
  margin: 10px;
}

footer {
  border: 2px solid green;
  background-color: greenyellow;
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: center;
  position: fixed;
  left: 0;
  bottom: 0;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100px;
}

button {
  border: 2px solid black;
  background-color: white;
  cursor: pointer;
  width: 50%;
  height: 70%;
}

<main></main>
<footer>
  <button onclick="randomColor()">CLICK ME!</button>
</footer>

Position fixed on Chrome mobile causing issues when scrolling

There are 1 best solutions below

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