One-row textarea in Firefox refuses to show vertical scrollbar

Question

I've already figured out that Firefox's sizing of textareas is buggy - it always adds one to your rows and cols settings. But I've decided to just ignore that. The problem is that Firefox also refuses to put in the vertical scrollbar, even if I type a friggin' short story into the box.

Am I doing something wrong (i.e. invalid)? Is there a workaround?

<textarea rows="1" cols="35" name="Cmnt1"></textarea>

(I want to use a one-row textarea instead of an input type=text precisely because the latter doesn't provide scrollbars. All the other browsers will give you a vertical scrollbar even on a one-row textarea.)

Note that this field will almost always contain just a single line of text, but it needs to accept more "just in case". A text input field is less than satisfactory (<-- understatement) because it always hides the overflow. In every other browser, a single-row textarea works exactly as I want. I vehemently disagree that what I want is a usability problem. Unfortunately, the way it behaves in Firefox is a usability problem.

Edit: turns out there's a bug with my installation of Firefox. :/

Answer 1

Focus on the textarea, hit the return key.

This sounds like a pretty terrible idea, by the way.

Answer 2

Try setting the height of the textarea to 1em with CSS (which means one line-height unit) and set the rows to a higher value.

Answer 3

Try setting the overflow css property to "scroll". For example:

<textarea rows="1" cols="35" name="Cmnt1" style="overflow: scroll;"></textarea>

Edit: Sorry, should be overflow-y: scroll.

Answer 4

I am using Firefox 2.0. The scrollbar on the textarea does not show up until the height of the textarea is 32px (which is about two lines of text). If the height is less than that the scrollbars disappear -- probably because there is not enough room to show the arrow icons.