A Beginner’s Guide to Mac Scroll Bars

The scroll bars on the Mac can be hard to understand for new users since they only appear when you need them. You typically use your Mouse or Trackpad to scroll, and most users can avoid the scroll bars altogether. However, if you need them, you will see them when scrolling and can click and drag them when they appear. You can also customize how they work and when they appear in System Preferences.

Comments: 2 Responses to “A Beginner’s Guide to Mac Scroll Bars”

    Mick Mueck
    6 years ago

    I ALWAYS displays scroll bars because I like to see the size of my page vs the entire document and I like easy access to page scrolling. The screen area scroll bars take up on a Mac is small - hiding them by default is a bad UI experience (the fact you had to make a video highlights that). I hate how hard it's become hard to quickly get to the top/bottom of a long document (esp. in iOS). Apple should have added a couple click regions in the scroll bar area for that purpose.

    Mick Mueck
    6 years ago

    Even with medium sized monitors I often get a race condition between starting a scroll and then moving the cursor to the scroll bar region to perform a scroll bar drag, only to have the darn thing disappear right before I click and drag so I end up losing my previously selected text. All of this unnecessary awkwardness is forced onto Mac users because Apple want to maintain scrolling parity with the tiny screen sizes on iOS devices! Aside from that, I do prefer natural scrolling.

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