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  • Styling Scrollable Areas

    Posted on September 28th, 2008; at 8:11 pm, in CSS

    The scrollbars on browser windows are not styled by the website itself, or even generally by the browser. They come from the operating system itself.

    The desire to customize the style of these scrollbars is strong. When you are starting out, it feels like something you should be able to do with CSS. Complicating the issue, if you search around for CSS to change/customize scrollbars, you’ll probably find it. The problem is that in IE 5.5, there was proprietary browser extensions to change the look of your scrollbars with attributes like “scrollbar-face-color”. IE 5.5 is long gone, and the concept of allowing that control in CSS is gone with it.

    There are situations though, where you will strongly wish you had control over the look of a scrollbar. For instance, when the scrollbar isn’t for the entire browser window. You have a small section on your page that you need to control the height of, but contains content which overflows the container. You may set the overflow of that container to “auto”, and get your default scrollbar. Depending on the design of the site, this scrollbar may look awkward and not at all desirable.

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