Question

When i call window.open, I can include a list of parameters. One of these paramaters is scrollbars, which can be set to yes or no.

When I put javascript in the child window, the javascript needs to detect if scrollbars were set to yes or no when the window was opened. I want to know if the window has scrollbars enabled by default or not.

I only care about doing this in IE. How do I check? window.scroolbar does not work in IE.

How do I do this? To be perfectly clear, I’m not talking about div overflows, I’m talking about the scrollbar property of the window.

edit:
– I am in IE so window.scrollbars/this.scrollbars won’t return anything
– The windows scrollbars exist outside the body.
– Looking at the document’s width will tell me about the document. I can even figure out if there are scrollbars in the document. This will not tell me anything about the window itself.
– The width of the window’s scrollbar changes dependent on what the currently selected Windows Desktop Theme is, for ascetic reasons.

Answer 1

You can determine if the window has a visible scrollbar in IE by using this little JavaScript trick:

//You'll have to modify this so as not to do it unless your user is running IE
window.attachEvent('onload', getChrome);

function getChrome() {
    //read the window width and height
    var w = document.documentElement.clientWidth;
    var h = document.documentElement.clientHeight;

    //set the window to that size
    window.resizeTo(w, h);

    //read the window width and height again
    var newW = document.documentElement.clientWidth;
    var newH = document.documentElement.clientHeight;

    //calculate the difference
    var diffX = w - newW;
    var diffY = h - newH;

    //set the window back to what it was
    window.resizeBy(diffX, diffY);

    alert('diffX: ' + diffX + '\ndiffY: ' + diffY);

    //If diffX is larger than 10 (in Vista and Windows 7, the borders are 5px each)
    //then you're scrollbar is visible.
}