Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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7.907K
· komrath

DIVs with position:absolute dissapearing in Android stock browser?

I recently encountered the bizzarre behaviour of the default Android stock browser — an absolutely positioned DIV was not rendered, while still "being there". Knowing where to click I could just use it as always, while jQuery was reporting that DIV is visible.

It turns out adding this little snippet to the DIV's CSS helped:

-webkit-backface-visibility: hidden

This issue happens since Android Ice Sandwich, yet Google Chrome and Firefox for Android work perfectly.

7 Responses
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Many thanks for this! I couldn't figure out the disappearing divs thing, and you saved me a lot of time. -Kelly

over 1 year ago ·

Could this happen on other elements as well?
an A tag and such; and what about an inner element like SPAN that is contained in the "missing" A being rendered instead?

over 1 year ago ·

@unleashthedog technically you can just do it for all elements * { ... }, it doesn't matter. For me the whole div was missing, the whole thing.

over 1 year ago ·

This exact problem is happening for me in chrome. Not sure why but this didnt seem to fix it for me. Using Nexus 5 with Android 4.4.2 installed. Default browser is now chrome.

Odd thing is that when I connect the phone and remote debug, the div magically appears. The div will also appear for the session when switching orientation. A page refresh and it disappears again.

Any ideas on how my situation is unique?

over 1 year ago ·

Oh that could be a bit tricky as Stock Browser is no longer used on Nexus 5 and Android KitKat (Chrome is used, which should work okay), but I would need to see more of the HTML/CSS code to find out why :-)

over 1 year ago ·

In htc default browser its still invisible, I added above code but in htc default browser I got no luck.

over 1 year ago ·

Alternative way (http://stackoverflow.com/a/13016642/2573869):
-webkit-transform:translateZ(0);

over 1 year ago ·