Why a Chat Widget Floats in the Middle of Your Screenshot

The support bubble lives in the bottom-right corner of the window. In your full-page screenshot it is sitting in the middle of the image, over a paragraph, nowhere near the corner of anything.

It is in the middle because of when it loaded, not where it sits.

Why it lands in the middle

A full-page capture is a stack of screens, taken one after another and stitched together. Each screen is the height of your browser window, so screen three’s bottom-right corner ends up a long way down the finished image — right in the middle, if the page is six screens tall.

Chat widgets are slower to arrive than the rest of the page. They are usually loaded by a third-party script, often inside their own frame, and frequently on a deliberate delay so they do not compete with the page for attention. Several seconds is normal.

So the capture starts, screens one and two are taken with no widget on the page, the widget finally appears, and every screen from that point on has it in the corner. Stack them and the bubble shows up partway down and then repeats to the end.

That is also how you tell this apart from an ordinary sticky element. A header that was there from the start repeats from the top of the image. A widget that loaded late starts partway down. Where the repeats begin tells you when the element arrived.

The variants of this problem

• It expands on its own. Some widgets open a greeting card a few seconds after loading, so the thing in your screenshot is not a small bubble but a panel covering a quarter of the page.
• It is in an iframe. Which is why removing it can be fiddlier than removing an ordinary element, and why it sometimes survives attempts to hide it.
• There is more than one. Chat, cookie preferences, a feedback tab and a newsletter prompt is a normal amount of furniture for a commercial page, and they arrive at different times.

What you can do about it

1. Let the page finish loading before you capture. The single most effective thing on this list. Give it five seconds after the page looks ready so the late scripts have arrived, then capture. Everything pinned is then pinned from screen one, which is the case tools handle well.
2. Close or collapse the widget first. Most have a dismiss control. Closed widgets usually collapse back to a small bubble rather than vanishing, so this reduces the damage without eliminating it.
3. Remove it with Inspect. Right-click the widget, choose Inspect, and delete the element that contains it. If it is in a frame you may need to go up a level or two in the element tree.
4. Cover it afterwards. On a capture you have already taken, cropping it out is usually impossible because it is in the middle. Blurring or boxing over it is the practical answer.

What PageStill does

Elements pinned to the window are hidden after the first screen is captured, so a widget that has already loaded appears once, at the top, and not down the rest of the image.

A widget that arrives during the capture is the honest limit here. The page is measured and the pinned elements are found at the start; something that appears halfway through was not there to find. On a page where this happens, waiting a few seconds and capturing again is the reliable answer, and the result will be clean.

If you would rather not recapture, the editor covers it: blur over the widget, or crop if it happens to have landed near an edge. Both are part of the paid editor.