How to programmatically disable page scrolling with jQuery

The only way I've found to do this is similar to what you described:

1. Grab current scroll position (don't forget horizontal axis!).
2. Set overflow to hidden (probably want to retain previous overflow value).
3. Scroll document to stored scroll position with scrollTo().

Then when you're ready to allow scrolling again, undo all that.

Edit: no reason I can't give you the code since I went to the trouble to dig it up...

// lock scroll position, but retain settings for later
var scrollPosition = [
  self.pageXOffset || document.documentElement.scrollLeft || document.body.scrollLeft,
  self.pageYOffset || document.documentElement.scrollTop  || document.body.scrollTop
];
var html = jQuery('html'); // it would make more sense to apply this to body, but IE7 won't have that
html.data('scroll-position', scrollPosition);
html.data('previous-overflow', html.css('overflow'));
html.css('overflow', 'hidden');
window.scrollTo(scrollPosition[0], scrollPosition[1]);


// un-lock scroll position
var html = jQuery('html');
var scrollPosition = html.data('scroll-position');
html.css('overflow', html.data('previous-overflow'));
window.scrollTo(scrollPosition[0], scrollPosition[1])

This will completely disable scrolling:

$('html, body').css({
    overflow: 'hidden',
    height: '100%'
});

To restore:

$('html, body').css({
    overflow: 'auto',
    height: 'auto'
});

Tested it on Firefox and Chrome.