Programmatically detect if the browser displays a temporary status bar?

With the recent Firefox and Chrome browser releases, the default status bar has been taken from us to free up more screen space and de-clutter the UI. The status bar was used to display the URL of any link the user rolls over, among other things.

The browser makers couldn't completely remove the status part of the status bar, because users need to be shown where they will be going if they roll over a link. They've settled into displaying a temporary, tooltip-style modeless text bar that appears at the bottom left or right of the browser window's client area on link rollover.

I'll put aside my displeasure with the browser makers invading MY beautiful client area and smearing their chrome all over with distracting fade-in开发者_高级运维 transitions and weak color/contrast choices. I'd just like some suggestions on how to best deal with this current situation.

I use absolute positioning to keep some of my DOM elements in the lower left and right of the visible client area on the page. Is there a way to detect in javascript how tall these temporary status bars will be so that I can vertically offset my elements far enough from the bottom of the page so that they are not occluded by the temporary status bar?

Browser plugins like StatusBar-4-Evar are not a good solution for me because I could never suggest that my users install anything to view my website. I'd like solutions to work with the browsers' default settings.

I don't want to work too hard for this; I'd like to avoid browser/version detection to know when I should vertically offset my elements. I am ready to accept if my page design is not workable and to assume the bottom of the page is now off-limits to any content other than that page content which flows there naturally.