Hiding the scroll bar on an HTML page

Question

Can CSS be used to hide the scroll bar? How would you do this?

Answer 1

WebKit supports scrollbar pseudo elements that can be hidden with standard CSS rules:

#element::-webkit-scrollbar {
    display: none;
}

If you want all scrollbars hidden, use

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

I'm not sure about restoring - this did work, but there might be a right way to do it:

::-webkit-scrollbar {
    display: block;
}

You can of course always use width: 0, which can then be easily restored with width: auto, but I'm not a fan of abusing width for visibility tweaks.

Firefox 64 now supports the experimental scrollbar-width property by default (63 requires a configuration flag to be set). To hide the scrollbar in Firefox 64:

#element {
    scrollbar-width: none;
}

To see if your current browser supports either the pseudo element or scrollbar-width, try this snippet:

.content {
  /* These rules create an artificially confined space, so we get
     a scrollbar that we can hide. They are not directly involved in
     hiding the scrollbar. */

  border: 1px dashed gray;
  padding: .5em;

  white-space: pre-wrap;
  height: 5em;
  overflow-y: scroll;
}

.content {
  /* This is the magic bit for Firefox */
  scrollbar-width: none;
}

.content::-webkit-scrollbar {
  /* This is the magic bit for WebKit */
  display: none;
}

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(Note that this is not really a correct answer to the question, because it hides the horizontal bars as well, but that's what I was looking for when Google pointed me here, so I figured I'd post it anyway.)