How To Disable Thin Scroll Bars On Windows 10
Windows 10 goes through lots of changes, big and small, with its feature updates. With these updates, new features like Timeline are added but they also add cosmetic changes like integrating fluent design in more apps. One small cosmetic change that Microsoft made was to the scroll bars. You can see them in the Settings app. When your mouse isn’t hovering over the scrollbars, they’re thin lines.
If you find them impractical to use, you can disable thin scroll bars in Windows 10 from the Settings app.
Disable Thin Scroll Bars
Open the Settings app and go to the Ease of Access group of settings. Select the Display tab and scroll down to the Automatically hide scroll bars in Windows switch. Turn it off and the thin bars will never appear again. By default, you’ll always see the thick scroll bars that you’re used to seeing in other apps, and that were the default on older versions of Windows 10.
This setting is well hidden. It ought to be in the Personalization group of settings where you find most miscellaneous settings like this e.g., importing or exporting themes. Most users might be unaware that you can disable thin scroll bars altogether but the setting is there.
The thin scroll bars only appear in most stock apps i.e. the Settings app, Edge, Grove, Photos, Movies & TV, etc. This setting will not affect Chrome, VLC, or Netflix. Most UWP apps don’t support this new UI change that was added in 1709, no desktop apps support it, not even the Control Panel.
Ease of Access
If you look under the Ease of Access group of settings, you’ll find there are quite a few useful switches and options there that might make using your system much easier. For example, if you have an older system or a conservative amount of RAM, you might want to disable animations on Windows 10. There’s a built-in switch that lets you do just that but it’s under Ease of Access, on the Display tab. If you don’t like the animations, you can turn them off with just a switch. There’s no need for third party apps or messing with the Windows Registry.
If you’ve ever wanted Mono audio on your PC, you can go to the Audio tab under Ease of Access and enable a switch to get it. This group of settings is a treasure trove of useful stuff that you might not think existed at all so it’s definitely worth checking out.
For anyone who is wondering, in my current Windows 11 version, this is now found under Settings > Accessibility > Visual Effects > Always show scrollbars.
I’m sure this will change shortly in order to inconvenience users more fully.
As usual, Windows is constantly rearranging the settings area so that tutorials like this never work.
As of March 2021, YouTube now gives me a very thin light gray (i.e., virtually useless and difficult to use) scroll bar on the right, somehow overriding my settings which feature a wide scroll bar. Is there any solution to this problem?
+1 on this question. And to any web-developers who might see this…
…STOP!
If we wanted thin, unusable scroll bars we wouldn’t have modified our settings to get rid of them!
OMG, thank you!!!
Thanks for posting this. The thin scrollbars “feature” is yet another example of misplace programmer effort. Doesn’t help anyone, but is just “change for the sake of change”. Super-irritating, and unfortunately increasingly pervasive.