Hide scroll bar, while still being able to scroll

Matthew C. —
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The Problem

You want to hide a page or page element scrollbar while still allowing scrolling; how do you do this? You may want to do this to improve the UI of a page. The page may not need a scrollbar to indicate that a user can scroll down, for example, a gallery of images with a scroll-down indicator icon.

You should try to avoid hiding scrollbars if possible. Hiding a scrollbar is not a good idea in terms of accessibility. Instead of hiding a scrollbar, consider styling it.

The Solution

You can hide the scrollbar with CSS using the -webkit-scrollbar CSS pseudo-element:

body::-webkit-scrollbar {
  display: none;
}

This will only work for Blink- and WebKit-based browsers: Chrome, Edge, Opera, Safari, all browsers on iOS, and others.

To hide the scrollbar in Firefox, set the scrollbar-width CSS property on the <html> element to “none”:

html {
  scrollbar-width: none;
}

You can also hide the scrollbar using JavaScript. For example, you can create a button to toggle the scrollbar visibility:

<button id="scrollbarToggle">
	Toggle Scrollbar
</button>

Create two different CSS classes to hide the scrollbar in Blink- and WebKit-based browsers or Firefox:

body.noScrollbarBlinkWebKit::-webkit-scrollbar {
    display: none;
}

html.noScrollbarFirefox {
    scrollbar-width: none;
}

You can then add an event listener to the button and toggle the CSS class on or off. The CSS class toggled will depend on the browser:

const scrollbarToggle = document.getElementById("scrollbarToggle");

const { userAgent } = navigator;
const isWebkit = /\b(iPad|iPhone|iPod)\b/.test(userAgent)
  || /WebKit/.test(userAgent)
  || /Chrome/.test(userAgent)
  || /Edge/.test(userAgent)
  || window.MSStream;

function toggleScrollbar() {
  if (!isWebkit) {
    document.documentElement.classList.toggle("noScrollbarFirefox");
  } else if (isWebkit) {
    document.body.classList.toggle("noScrollbarBlinkWebKit");
  }
}

scrollbarToggle.addEventListener("click", () => {
  toggleScrollbar();
});

The type of browser is detected using the user agent. Browser detection is generally not recommended.

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