scrollbar-color

The scrollbar-color property controls the two colors of a scrollbar: the thumb color and the track color. scrollbar-color is part of the CSS Working Group’s Scrollbars Module Level 1 draft, which is still a work in progress as of this writing.

Prior to scrollbar-color, developers had no standard way to change the default appearance of a browser’s scrollbars without resorting to hiding the scrollbar via overflow: hidden and rendering JavaScript-based scrollbars or using browser-prefixed scrollbar attributes. With scrollbar-color, on the other hand, we can style a scrollbar to match a design without resorting to redoing browser functionality or using vendor prefixes.

.scrollable-element {
  scrollbar-color: red yellow;
}

scrollbar-color will also accept values of dark and light to match a user’s preferences if they’re using something like dark mode on Mac OSX.

.scrollable-element {
  scrollbar-color: dark;
}

As of March 2019, support for dark and light values is not available in any browser. is supported in Firefox. See the browser support section below for details.

Syntax

scrollbar-color: auto | dark | light | <color>;

Values

scrollbar-color accepts the following values:

• auto is the default value and will render the standard scrollbar colors for the user agent.
• dark will tell the user agent to use darker scrollbars to match the current color scheme.
• light will tell the user agent to use lighter scrollbars to match the current color scheme.
• <color> specifies two colors to be used for the scrollbar. The first color is for the “thumb” or the moveable part of the scrollbar which appears on top. The second color is for the “track” or the fixed portion of the scrollbar.

Example

This combines the new spec syntax and the WebKit prefixed stuff.

Browser Support

Related

• scrollbar-gutter
• scrollbar-width
• scrollbar

Resources

• The Current State of Styling Scrollbars
• Custom Scrollbars in WebKit
• CSSWG Scrollbars Module draft
• W3C collection of use-cases for scrollbar modification
• Future of CSS: Scrollbars on dev.to
• Chromium Issue 891944