Preventing scroll bars from being hidden for MacOS trackpad users in WebKit/Blink

The appearance of the scroll bars can be controlled with WebKit's -webkit-scrollbar pseudo-elements [blog]. You can disable the default appearance and behaviour by setting -webkit-appearance [docs] to none.

Because you're removing the default style, you'll also need to specify the style yourself or the scroll bar will never show up. The following CSS recreates the appearance of the hiding scroll bars:

Example (jsfiddle)

CSS
.frame::-webkit-scrollbar {
    -webkit-appearance: none;
}

.frame::-webkit-scrollbar:vertical {
    width: 11px;
}

.frame::-webkit-scrollbar:horizontal {
    height: 11px;
}

.frame::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
    border-radius: 8px;
    border: 2px solid white; /* should match background, can't be transparent */
    background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, .5);
}

.frame::-webkit-scrollbar-track { 
    background-color: #fff; 
    border-radius: 8px; 
} 
WebKit (Chrome) Screenshot

screenshot showing webkit's scrollbar, without needing to hover


For a one-page web application where I add scrollable sections dynamically, I trigger OSX's scrollbars by programmatically scrolling one pixel down and back up:

// Plain JS:
var el = document.getElementById('scrollable-section');
el.scrollTop = 1;
el.scrollTop = 0;

// jQuery:
$('#scrollable-section').scrollTop(1).scrollTop(0);

This triggers the visual cue fading in and out.


Here is a shorter bit of code that reenables scroll bars across your entire website. I'm not sure if it's much different than the current most popular answer but here it is:

::-webkit-scrollbar {
    -webkit-appearance: none;
    width: 7px;
}
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
    border-radius: 4px;
    background-color: rgba(0,0,0,.5);
    box-shadow: 0 0 1px rgba(255,255,255,.5);
}

Found at this link: http://simurai.com/blog/2011/07/26/webkit-scrollbar