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;
}

<div class='content'>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris eu
urna et leo aliquet malesuada ut ac dolor. Fusce non arcu vel ligula
fermentum sodales a quis sapien. Sed imperdiet justo sit amet venenatis
egestas. Integer vitae tempor enim. In dapibus nisl sit amet purus congue
tincidunt. Morbi tincidunt ut eros in rutrum. Sed quam erat, faucibus
vel tempor et, elementum at tortor. Praesent ac libero at arcu eleifend
mollis ut eget sapien. Duis placerat suscipit eros, eu tempor tellus
facilisis a. Vivamus vulputate enim felis, a euismod diam elementum
non. Duis efficitur ac elit non placerat. Integer porta viverra nunc,
sed semper ipsum. Nam laoreet libero lacus.

Sed sit amet tincidunt felis. Sed imperdiet, nunc ut porta elementum,
eros mi egestas nibh, facilisis rutrum sapien dolor quis justo. Quisque
nec magna erat. Phasellus vehicula porttitor nulla et dictum. Sed
tincidunt scelerisque finibus. Maecenas consequat massa aliquam pretium
volutpat. Duis elementum magna vel velit elementum, ut scelerisque
odio faucibus.
</div>

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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.)