Hide the vertical scrollbar in Firefox
There’s never enough screen real estate no matter how big your resolution or how many displays you’ve got. However most of the time it’s possible to optimize your UI to be as small as possible so that the actual content gets the maximum amount of SRE.
Classic Compact is a theme for firefox designed to minimize the size of the UI while still keeping it’s functionality intact. It can be tweaked even smaller with the Classic Compact Options addon. Classic Compact, however gets ~6000 weekly downloads so quite a few people obviously know about it by now.
However, there’s one thing even the aforementioned theme doesn’t fix: the vertical scrollbar. Go ahead and ask yourself how often do you favor flicking the mouse wheel instead of using the scrollbar? After all, that’s 14-20 pixels of horizontal space it’s wasting ;)
I did some research and most of the solutions regarding the removal of Firefox 3’s scrollbar involved modifying stylesheets inside .jar-files with a different file to find and edit for Firefox2, Firefox3 and Firefox3 on Vista. Some of these also disabled the ability to scroll with the mouse wheel. Luckily I found Stylish, an add-on which lets you use different style sheets for different websites. It also has the possibility to set global styles and this is where it comes in handy.
After installing Stylish and restarting Firefox, just create a new style with the following content:
/* hide scrollbars */
notificationbox {
overflow-x: hidden;
overflow-y: hidden;
}
browser[type="content-primary"], browser[type="content-targetable"] {
overflow-y: scroll;
overflow-x: scroll;
margin-right: -17px;
margin-bottom: -17px;
}
Now click on Preview, adjust the -17px to suit your system’s settings and you’re done.
Oh, and if you ever happen to need the scrollbar for some reason, you can disable the style with 2 clicks of the mouse!
Tags: hacks
March 3rd, 2009 at 0:35:28
Worked like a charm (on top of Autohide)! Gracias
March 11th, 2009 at 15:19:45
great great !!!
March 25th, 2009 at 18:42:57
Thanks a bunch! This works flawlessly.
May 16th, 2009 at 16:03:54
Your guide is a brilliant solution for removing the vertical scrollbar!
Is it possible to remove the horizontal scrollbar too?
I would really like to be able to dispose of both!
Thank you
May 17th, 2009 at 9:19:12
Code now updated to remove both scrollbars.
May 18th, 2009 at 5:36:53
Preaching minimalism while leaving the ridiculous amount of default border padding on windows doesn’t make sense.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:13:48
Thanks, works brilliant. It moved the scroll bar more to the right site, it doesn’t disappear the whole scroll bar
May 25th, 2009 at 0:30:51
good
June 4th, 2009 at 15:48:01
This is a still better code.
http://userstyles.org/styles/13594
March 18th, 2010 at 17:44:26
Is there away that you can edit this code so that it will still show the status bar at the bottom? That would be great. This code is better than the last one pasted cause this doesnt disable the scroll function with two fingers :-)
March 23rd, 2010 at 18:09:39
Wow Dude its Rocks. I was madly luking for this. thanks for your help
You aree Superb
March 26th, 2010 at 17:38:27
So useful! Like you said, “that’s 14-20 pixels of horizontal space it’s wasting”
Thanks!
April 8th, 2010 at 17:24:52
This is great and really easy. thanks!