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How to make Firefox vertical scrollbars more visible on Windows 11

Published on 21st March 2025 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

While some articles on the web have reading time added to them, thus the vertical scrollbar of a web browser can act as a hint of the length of a piece. Unfortunately, they are being made less conspicuous for the sake of aesthetics and at the expense of utility. Since Firefox is the browser that I use most of the time, addressing the matter there became a priority for me, Here then is how you configure things on Windows 11.

The first step is to open a new tab before entering about:config in the URL bar and pressing the return key on your keyboard. If doing this for the first time, you will meet a warning screen that you can disable. Agreeing to the warning conveys you to the next screen, where you can enter the string "scrollbar" and use the enter key to bring up a swathe of settings.

There are two that you need to set to false by double-clicking on the pre-existing value of true: widget.windows.overlay-scrollbars.enabled and widget.non-native-theme.win.scrollbar.use-system-size. There is one more setting that you need to tweak: widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override should have a value greater than zero, the default. Using one of ten did what I wanted once I restarted Firefox. After that, I have things as I want them to be, though you may want to refine the width setting for your needs.

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