How do I avoid the narrowing-and-fading effect Thunderbird vertical scrollbars?
Sep 30
I'm using Thunderbird v. 143 on a Windows 11 23H2 machine, and I'm bothered by how the vertical scrollbars look.
I want the toolbars to always be prominently visible and have a decent width and clear position indicator. instead, when a scrollbar is not focused, it becomes very narrow - maybe 4-5 pixels on a 1920-pixel display - and its position indicator becomes a faded gray instead of a stronger gray.
How can I force it to always look the same as in its mouseover state? With decent width and no fading?
Notes:
- Based on an older suggestion found on the web, I tried playing with
chrome/userChrome.cssin my profile folder, sayingscrollbar { width: 20px !important; }, but that did not seem to have any effect. - If there's additional information I can provide, please ask in a comment.
1 answer
Accepted answer · original discussion
Sep 30
While Windows doesn't force this behavior, it does use it in both Win10 and Win11 (though not all default widgets implement it equally) and other programs frequently imitate what Windows does – or they may be using Windows-native scrollbar widgets which then implement it automatically.
Go to Windows Settings → "Accessibility" → "Visual Effects" and enable the option "Always show scrollbars". It is honored by Firefox and Thunderbird, which appear to actually be using the Windows-provided scrollbar (as it immediately updates). The option was also present in Windows 10 in approximately the same location.
The scrollbar being a generic Windows component would also be why it ignores your CSS (due to being outsourced to the OS rather than Gecko-drawn).
Alternatively, go to about:config (Thunderbird: Settings → General → "Config Editor" at the very bottom), find the option widget.windows.overlay-scrollbars.enabled and set it to 'false'. This needs the program to be restarted so that it could completely switch to its traditional custom-drawn scrollbars.
(Generally, search the config for scrollbar to find other interesting settings. There is a separate about:config setting for GTK overlay scrollbars on Linux, which likewise can be either switched to non-overlay ones globally via GNOME Tweaks, or Fx/Tb can be told to not use the GTK-provided scrollbars at all.)
As for the rest of Thunderbird's UI – the recent degradation is due to the port of various widgets from XUL to HTML5, which I believe was unavoidable at some point if they wanted to keep up with Firefox's rendering engine. (Firefox itself has mostly ditched XUL years ago.) The new UI is very slowly improving.
1 question comment
Use comments to ask for clarification. Post a solution as an answer.
Sep 30