It is possible to specify the scrollbar image with HTML5?

Question

I need to display a custom scrollbar. I would like to avoid using a jQuery plugin if possible. So can I so something like this with HTML5 & CSS3 ? :

.myScrollableBox {
  width: 200px;
  height: 500px;

  /* Display scrollbar if content is bigger than the box */
  overflow: auto;

  /* This doesn't work, but can I do something similar? */
  scrollbar-image: url(/images/myscrollbar.png); 
}

Solution 1

It's actually possible, if browser does support styling of toolbar elements (= is based on WebKit). Although it's not mentioned in many tutorials (such as this brilliant one, for example), you can just use background-url property to use custom image instead of color.

For example, in this page I've changed (in Chrome Developer Tools) styling to...

::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
  -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
  border-radius: 10px;
  background: url('http://cdn.css-tricks.com/wp-content/themes/CSS-Tricks-10/images/header-demos.jpg');
  -webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 0 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
}

... and voila, I have some cyanid scroller. )

Solution 2

Yes you can, but it is not supported in every browser. Webkit (Chrome etc) has support for this using css:

-webkit-scrollbar
-webkit-scrollbar-button
-webkit-scrollbar-track
-webkit-scrollbar-track-piece
-webkit-scrollbar-thumb
-webkit-scrollbar-corner
-webkit-resizer

Read more: https://www.webkit.org/blog/363/styling-scrollbars/

In Internet Explorer you can user css like scrollbar-face-color or -ms-scrollbar-face-color

-ms-scrollbar-3dlight-color
-ms-scrollbar-arrow-color
-ms-scrollbar-base-color
-ms-scrollbar-darkshadow-color
-ms-scrollbar-face-color
-ms-scrollbar-highlight-color
-ms-scrollbar-shadow-color
-ms-scrollbar-track-color 

Read more: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh772048%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

As far as I know, other browsers do not support this at the moment.

Comments

[raina77ow]

Well, sometimes even more unimaginable things are made possible by these moderny browsers. )

[arkascha]

@raina77ow: sure, you could for example take the browsers source code and reprogram it. That certainly is possible, true.