I saw a post on Mastodon lamenting the current state of scroll bars in computer software, most often in web browsers, but pretty much everywhere they appear. They have become weirdly thin, they’ve lost the navigation up/down arrows, they often disappear when no scrolling is taking place, or they’re completely off by default.
I miss the old days of chunky scroll bars that:
- Let you know where you are in a document/web page/window
- Allow you to easily grab the widget to scroll in bigger chunks
- Had those navigation arrows that let you scroll a little bit with the mouse or arrow keys
My browser of choice, Firefox, uses the in vogue super-thin scroll bars, but this article shows how to make them chunky again. Woo. I repeat the steps here because I found this both useful and delightful and wanted to share it.
How to Get Chunky Scroll Bars in Firefox
- In the address bar, enter
about:config, then click the button after the scary warning appears - Search for
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override - Edit the number to your desired chunkiness. I find 18 or 20 comes pretty close to what I consider “classic” scroll bar size.
- Bonus: Change the shape of the widget by searching for
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.styleand changing that number. Choosing 4 changes the widget to a classic-style rectangle.
This may go away on future versions of Firefox, and it doesn’t put back the navigation arrows, but it’s still nice to not just have chunky scroll bars back, but actual customizable scroll bars!
