scrollbars

The scrollbar-gutter property provides flexibility to determine how the space the browser uses to display a scrollbar that interacts with the content on the screen. The spec describes it "reserving space for the scrollbar" and that makes sense since that's what a gutter ultimately is: a container that reserves space for whatever is in it and separates it from other elements.

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You can make it auto-hiding instead of always-showing:

html {
  -ms-overflow-style: -ms-autohiding-scrollbar;
}

Turns out like this:

Credit to Thierry Koblentz for digging this gem out of Jon Neal's Sanitize.css.

Scrollbars are one of those UI components that are present on almost every page of the internet, yet we (developers) have little to no control over it. Some browsers give us the ability to customize their appearance but for most browsers including Firefox it just is not possible.

Still, Chrome and Internet Explorer (yes) make it possible for us to define custom styles for scrollbars. However the syntax horribly complex, and of course, definitely not standard. Welcome to the proprietary world. This is why you might want to have a little mixin to easily customize your scrollbars. Right?

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The scrollbar set of CSS properties is a proprietary style hook from Internet Explorer 5.5, which let designers create custom themes for the browser's native scrollbars. Currently, it is exposed behind the -webkit vendor prefix for use in browsers using the Webkit (and Blink) rendering engine. This almanac entry is an overview, for a more complete breakdown of working with custom scrollbars, please read this CSS-Tricks article.

body::-webkit-scrollbar {
    width: 1em;
}
 
body::-webkit-scrollbar-track {
    -webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 0 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.3);
}
 
body::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
  background-color: darkgrey;
  outline: 1px solid slategrey;
}

The -webkit-scrollbar family of properties consists of seven different pseudo-elements that, together, comprise a full scrollbar UI element:

1. ::-webkit-scrollbar addresses the background of the bar itself. It is usually covered by the other elements
2. ::-webkit-scrollbar-button addresses the directional buttons on the scrollbar
3. ::-webkit-scrollbar-track addresses the empty space “below” the progress bar
4. ::-webkit-scrollbar-track-piece is the top-most layer of the the progress bar not covered by the draggable scrolling element (thumb)
5. ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb addresses the draggable scrolling element that resizes depending on the size of the scrollable element
6. ::-webkit-scrollbar-corner addresses the (usually) bottom corner of the scrollable element, where two scrollbars might meet
7. ::-webkit-resizer addresses the draggable resizing handle that appears above the scrollbar-corner at the bottom corner of some elements

In addition to these pseudo-elements, there are also eleven pseudo-selector classes that aren't required, but provide designers with the power to style various states and interactions of the scrollbar UI. A full breakdown of those pseudo-selectors, and a detailed example, can be found in this CSS-Tricks article.

Check out this Pen!

Points of Interest

• If there is no qualifying selector preceding the various pseudo-elements, the styles will apply to any scrollbar that may appear on the page.
• Setting -webkit-scrollbar styles is a good way to force your webpage to show horizontal or vertical scrollbars on versions of Mac OS newer than Lion, on which scrollbars are usually hidden by default.
• Since this property is behind a -webkit vendor prefix, several jQuery plugins have been written to “polyfill” or extend this functionality to other browsers. One such plugin is jScrollPane.

Other Resources

• CSS-Tricks: Custom Scrollbars in Webkit
• Surfin’ Safari: Styling Scrollbars
• jScrollPane
• -webkit-scrollbar on OSX

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