Fixed-sticky: a CSS position:sticky polyfill

• (c)2013 @zachleat, Filament Group
• MIT license

Explanation

CSS position:sticky is really in its infancy in terms of browser support. In stock browsers, it is currently only available in iOS 6. In Chrome you can enable it by navigating to chrome://flags and enabling experimental “WebKit features” or “Web Platform features” (Canary).

Usage

Just qualify element you’d like to be position:sticky with a fixedsticky class.

<div id="my-element" class="fixedsticky">

Add your own CSS to position the element. Supports any value for top or bottom.

.fixedsticky { top: 0; }

Next, add the events and initialize your sticky nodes:

$( '#my-element' ).fixedsticky();

Note: if you’re going to use non-zero values for top or bottom, fixed-sticky is victim to a cross-browser incompatibility with jQuery’s css method (namely, IE8- doesn’t normalize non-pixel values to pixels). Use pixels (or 0) for best cross-browser compatibility.

Demos

• For a fixed-sticky demo, open demo.html.
• For a pure native position: sticky test, open demo-control.html.

Native position: sticky Caveats

• iOS (and Chrome) do not support position: sticky; with display: inline-block;.
• sticky elements are constrained to the dimensions of their parents.
• This plugin (and Chrome’s implementation) does not (yet) support use with thead and tfoot.

Using the polyfill instead of native

If you’re having weird issues with native position: sticky, you can tell fixed-sticky to use the polyfill instead of native. Just override the sticky feature test to always return false.

// After fixed-sticky.js
FixedSticky.tests.sticky = false;

• demo-opt-out-native.html shows this behavior.

Installation

Use the provided fixedsticky.js and fixedsticky.css files.

Also available in Bower

bower install filament-sticky

Browser Support

These tests were performed using fixed-sticky with fixed-fixed. It’s safest to use them together (position:fixed is a minefield on older devices), but they can be used independently.

Native Sticky

• iOS 6.1, iOS 7

Polyfilled

• Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, 10
• Firefox 24, Firefox 17 ESR
• Chrome 29
• Safari 6.0.5
• Opera 12.16
• Android 4.X

Fallback (static positioning)

• Android 2.X
• Opera Mini
• Blackberry OS 5, 6, 7
• Windows Phone 7.5

TODO

• Add support for table headers.
• Vanilla JS version.
• Make sticky smoother on transition between sticky/static for container based

Tests

Release History

• v0.1.0: Initial release.
• v0.1.3: Bug fixes, rudimentary tests, destroy method.