A Guide To Using Custom Scrollbars On Your Site

“Don’t play with the defaults”, people say. It confuses the users by adding complexity, where simplicity will do just fine. But then, there’s “Think Different”. In this crowded internet space, your site needs to stand out from the mundane. If you know you can do something better, why not go the extra mile?

When I first saw Tim Van Damme’s blog, the scrollbar immediately got my attention. It was a regular [well designed] site, but with a revamped scrollbar totally fitting with his content. And I wanted that. As always, when curious on the web, I fire up Safari’s web inspector and look around. Turns out, it’s a feature of Webkit that allows you to modify the scrollbar to anything you’d like. There’s a catch to this however: you can’t modify the main scrollbar. Webkit provides this features so you can easily style ugly scrollbars within frames, but you can’t stop smart hackers from making .