How to Customize Scrollbar Style in Firefox
Tired of seeing the same old scrollbar on your favorite browser? Here’s how you can customize it easily.
Mozilla Firefox is one of the most customizable browsers available. It includes many built-in toolbars, themes, New Tab page, tabs, and navigation customization options. Many customization extensions are also available for Firefox.
However, Firefox does not include any standard scrollbar customization options in its Settings tab. Nevertheless, you can still change the scrollbar style of this browser to different alternatives in the browser’s about:config (Advanced Preferences) menu. This is how you can customize the style of Firefox’s scrollbar by changing a hidden flag in Firefox’s Advanced Preferences tab.
How to change Firefox’s scrollbar style via the About:Config page
Firefox (version 97) offers five alternate default scrollbar styles to match the platform you’re using the browser on. For example, Windows 11 has a default minimal shape native overlay scrollbar style that only shows up/down arrow buttons when you place the cursor at the top or bottom of the bar. Firefox will use the same scrollbar style if you’re using Microsoft’s latest desktop operating system.
However, Firefox’s scrollbar style is not the same in Windows 10. By default, Firefox has a wider scrollbar that always shows its up/down buttons when used on this platform. This scrollbar matches the Windows 10 default scrollbar theme.
Firefox has five different scrollbars. Apart from the Windows versions, it offers additional styles for Mac OS, Android, and GTX. So if you are using Firefox on a Mac OS or Android device, it will show the corresponding scroll bar. However, you can change Mozilla Firefox’s scroll bar to one of these four alternatives by adjusting the value of scrollbar.style preferably setting as follows.
- First, launch the Firefox browser.
- Type about: setup in the Firefox URL bar, and press the Enter key.
- Click it Accept the risk and carry on button on warning prompt.
- Enter widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style in the search preference name field.
- press the To return to Where Enter button to find the setting.
- Click it Edit (pencil) on the right side of the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style setting.
- Delete Current 0 value for the default operating system style scrollbar.
- Then enter the value 1 (Mac OS X), 2 (GTX), 3 (Android), 4 (Windows 10), or 5 (Windows 11) in the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style box for the scrollbar style you want to change. For example, enter 4 to change the scrollbar to the default Windows 10 design.
- Click it to safeguard button on the right side of the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style parameter to apply.
Now you can experience Firefox’s new scrollbar style. Enter a keyword in the URL bar of the browser and press To return to to display the search results page. Then you can scroll the search page up and down with the new browser scroll bar. If you entered 1 for the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style setting, Firefox will have a sleeker, rounded scrollbar like the one shown below.
Firefox’s default scrollbar style is 0, which sets it to match your platform. You can restore the original default setting by clicking Edit and entering 0 in the value area for the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style option.
To further customize the Firefox scrollbar, see Custom Scrollbars. Custom Scrollbars is a Firefox and Google Chrome extension with which you can change the scrollbar’s color scheme, width, roundness, and buttons. The MUO guide linked below provides details on how to use this extension.
To download: Custom Scrollbars for Firefox (Free)
the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style flag is an excellent, albeit hidden, Firefox customization setting. With this, you can choose a different scrollbar style than what your system uses by default. This is one of many hidden configuration options in Mozilla Firefox Advanced preferences tongue. With this menu, you can choose the style that best suits you.
Read more
About the Author