The Current State of Styling Scrollbars

If you need to style your scrollbars right now, one option is to use a collection of ::webkit prefixed CSS properties.

See the Pen CSS-Tricks Almanac: Scrollbars by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Sadly, that doesn't help out much for Firefox or Edge, or the ecosystem of browsers around those.

But if that's good enough for what you need, you can get rather classy with it:

See the Pen Custom Scrollbar styling by Devstreak (@devstreak) on CodePen.

There are loads of them on CodePen to browse. It's a nice thing to abstract with a Sass @mixin as well.

There is good news on this front! The standards bodies that be have moved toward a standardizing methods to style scrollbars, starting with the gutter (or width) of them. The main property will be scrollbar-gutter and Geoff has written it up here. Hopefully Autoprefixer will help us as the spec is finalized and browsers start to implement it so we can start writing the standardized version and get any prefixed versions from that.

But what if we need cross-browser support?

If styled scrollbars are a necessity (and I don't blame you), then you'll probably have to reach for a JavaScript solution. There must be dozens of libraries for that. I ran across simplebar and it looks like a pretty modern one with easy instantiation. Here's a demo of that:

See the Pen simple-bar by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Here's another one called simple-scrollbar:

See the Pen simple-scroll-bar by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Das Surma did a very fancy tutorial that creates a custom scrollbar that doesn't actually require any JavaScript when scrolling (good for perf), but does require some JavaScript setup code.

Custom scrollbars are extremely rare and that’s mostly due to the fact that scrollbars are one of the remaining bits on the web that are pretty much unstylable (I’m looking at you, date picker). You can use JavaScript to build your own, but that’s expensive, low fidelity and can feel laggy. In this article we will leverage some unconventional CSS matrices to build a custom scroller that doesn’t require any JavaScript while scrolling, just some setup code.

I'll embed a copy here:

See the Pen Custom Scrollbar Example from Google Chrome Labs by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

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