Is there a way to disable custom webkit scrollbars?

Is there an extension, custom user stylesheet, etc. that will disable or revert the customization of scrollbars in Webkit based browsers like Google Chrome? I like the plain, native scrollbars but I cannot seem to find a combination of CSS to make them come back once they have been styled by CSS.


Unfortunately, the CSS cannot be "disabled" or reverted once activated:

::-webkit-scrollbar cannot be simply overridden to get the default style, the only way to do it is to remove all ::-webkit-scrollbar rules from the code. At that point, scrollable areas have to be forced to redraw the scrollbars. To do that you either quickly add and remove display:none; from or do the same thing with overflow:hidden; on scrollable elements. The problem with the first one is that the page flashes white at every page load; the second one is resource-intensive as it would have to whether check any element on the page overflows—not ideal.

The link above is from a script that will remove the custom bars completely, leaving you with no scroll bar.


Open your web browser executable in a binary-clean text editor or hex editor, and replace all occurrences of "webkit-scrollbar" with some other junk like "webkit-scrollb4r". I just tried this with Chrome and it solves the problem.


I took @bumfo's answer, and fixed this security issue on chrome: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49161159/uncaught-domexception-failed-to-read-the-rules-property-from-cssstylesheet

If you paste this in your console, you'll get your scroll bars back:

for (var sheetI = 0; sheetI < document.styleSheets.length; ++sheetI) {
    var sheet = document.styleSheets[sheetI];
    try {
        var ruleSet = sheet.rules || sheet.cssRules;
        for (var i = 0; i < ruleSet.length; ++i) {
            var rule = ruleSet[i];
            if (/scrollbar/.test(rule.selectorText)) {
                sheet.deleteRule(i--);
            }
        }
    } catch (e) {
        console.warn("Can't read the css rules of: " + sheet.href, e);
    }
};

Here's a chrome extension with this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/default-scrollbar/nkjmoagfbmeafonfhbkeicjdhjlofplo

And its github repo: https://github.com/ubershmekel/default-scrollbar