Question

I’m working on a browser based app, currently I’m developing and styling for the mobile Safari browser for iPad.

I’m looking for two things: How can I disable vertical scrolling for pages that don’t require it? And how can I disable the elastic bounce effect?

Answer 1

This answer is no longer state of the art, unless you are developing for a very old iOS device… Please see other solutions

---

2011 answer: For a web/html app running inside iOS Safari you want something like

document.ontouchmove = function(event){
    event.preventDefault();
}

For iOS 5 you may want to take the following into account: document.ontouchmove and scrolling on iOS 5

Update September 2014:
A more thorough approach can be found here: https://github.com/luster-io/prevent-overscroll. For that and a whole lot of useful webapp advice, see http://www.luster.io/blog/9-29-14-mobile-web-checklist.html

Update March 2016: That last link is no longer active – see https://web.archive.org/web/20151103001838/http://www.luster.io/blog/9-29-14-mobile-web-checklist.html for the archived version instead. Thanks @falsarella for pointing that out.