How to force Firefox to render textarea padding the same as in a div?

Question

I'm attempting to provide a consistent width per line in pixels inside of a textarea across IE8, Firefox and Safari, so that text content wraps lines as predictably and consistently as possible.

Firefox is doing something a little bit odd: it has an extra pixel of padding eating out of the content space of the textarea vs the other two browsers, and vs a similarly equipped div block.

When applying this class to both a textarea and a div the difference is visible, with the text in the div touching the outer left edge of the red background but the text in the textarea have 1 px padding-like offset in spite of padding being zero:

.testbox{
    padding:0;
    margin:0;
    border:0;
    background: red;
    width: 40px;
    height: 40px;
    font-size: 12px;
    line-height: 16px;
}

Other values for padding wind up displaying one extra pixel of offset vs a div.

Any ideas on if there's a way to trick Firefox to render a textarea as if it were a div, or to adjust this not-padding-but-looks-like-padding property for a textarea?

Answer 1

I have recently been doing some researching on the problem described by OP for a similar question on SO. It seems that a bug in Firefox is causing the rendering of this so called "not-padding-but-looks-like-padding" on textarea elements.

Usually this extra padding is not really an issue, but it becomes an issue when you want to keep two elements the same width, and you care about getting its content to wrap the same way in both elements.

Getting textarea's to wrap content the same as e.g. div elements in Firefox

It seems to be impossible to get rid of this 1.5px wide padding on the textarea in Firefox, so if you want to ensure that the content wrapping inside a div in Firefox behaves exactly the same as the content wrapping inside a textarea in Firefox, the best approach seems to be to add an additional 1.5px of padding on the right and the left hand side inside the div, but only in Firefox. You can accomplish this by setting the following vendor specific prefixed CSS properties on your div:

-moz-box-sizing: border-box;
-moz-padding-end: 1.5px; 
-moz-padding-start: 1.5px; 

The first ensures that the padding set on the div does not increase the width of the div, and the next two ensure that 1.5px of padding will be set on the right and the left hand side of the div.

This approach does not affect the rendering of the div's in any other browsers, it doesn't need to, as textarea's in other browsers don't render any extra padding. But it ensures that there are no content wrapping differences between div's and textarea's inside Firefox as long as they share the same font-family and font-size properties and so on.

Here's a jsFiddle for demonstration purposes.

Getting textarea's to wrap content consistently across browsers

If you only wanted to ensure that a textarea in Firefox has the same width and wrapping behaviour as a textarea in other browsers, you can set its box-sizing to border-box, add a padding on both sides of 5.5px and set -moz-padding-end and -moz-padding-start to 0px.

textarea {
    padding: 0 5.5px 0 5.5px;
    -moz-padding-end: 0px;
    -moz-padding-start: 0px;
    -moz-box-sizing: border-box;
    -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
    box-sizing: border-box;
}

Here's a jsFiddle showing this approach.