Unfix Fixed Elements

Intelligently reverses ill-conceived element fixing on sites like Medium.com

As of 2019-05-27. See the latest version.

Author
x0a
Ratings
0 0 0
Version
1.4
Created
2018-12-16
Updated
2019-05-27
License
N/A
Applies to
All sites

Description

Removes annoying sticky headers, footers, navigation bars and banners from websites like Medium.com

Synopsis

On my personal laptop, the header and footer on Medium.com obscure a whopping 40% of horizontal screen space.

A very simple, but naive, way to solve the problem would be to find and override every fixed block element with {display: none}. This works but you may lose important elements of the page such as navigation, modals, alerts and prompts. Another method would be to change position to "relative", "static" or "absolute". But this severely breaks scrolling on a site like Medium, and can lead to garbled pages if an element's position in HTML is vastly different from its expected position on the page. A much more effective solution is to conditionally hide/show fixed elements depending on the user's scroll position on the page.

Additional usage

Press Alt + Shift + F to toggle unfixing and re-fixing.