Further sticky bookmarklet fun

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I just couldn’t leave that poor bookmarklet alone, could I? Using the previous version in the wild, I noticed some use cases where there was room for improvement. Right now my bookmarklet does two things:

  • It checks the <body> for any scroll disabling styling and tries to unset it
  • It finds any element with either position: fixed or position: sticky and deletes them

Sounds good enough, right? Well, not quite. I found one big glaring issue with this; headers. Many times, modern websites use position: sticky for headers. If I delete them — well, then I’ve broken the site a little too much.

Based on my very scientific research following this, by visiting as many as ten websites, I could conclude the following:

  1. Most annoying overlays and modals is positioned using position: fixed — these we can safely destroy with fire
  2. Most functional elements of a page, such as the header, uses position: fixed — these we want to keep, but away from scrolling view

These assumptions (dangerous as assumptions may be), lead me to modify the script accordingly.

const elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *');
const body = document.querySelector('body');

if (getComputedStyle(body).overflow === 'hidden') {
  body.style.overflow = 'unset';
}

elements.forEach(function (element) {
  if (['-webkit-sticky', 'sticky'].includes(getComputedStyle(element).position)) {
    element.style.position = 'unset';
  }
  else if(['fixed'].includes(getComputedStyle(element).position)) {
    element.parentNode.removeChild(element);
  }
});

I first check for position: sticky styled elements, and instead of removing them, I force the inline style to position: unset. This will reset to the initial value of position: static and so “un-sticky” any such elements on the page. Everything else that has position: fixed will instead just get deleted.

There are of course some caveats with this approach, mostly that older sites might still have sticky-ish headers that are positioned with the fixed property. I believe this is fine. Compared to the previous version, that just killed everything in sight, regardless of fixed or sticky, we now get something a bit more precise.

I’m beginning to have trouble coming up with good names for these bookmarklets, so this time around I’m just calling it “unSticky”. Besides, you’re completely free to name it whatever you wish.

unSticky

Ok, that’s it for now. Let’s see how long I can leave this one alone.

Updated: Well that didn’t take long. My friend, Joacim de la Motte, decided to do some optimization for me. Apparently the IIFE is not really necessary, so I’ve removed it. The bookmarklet will still run without it.