How to create a custom scrollbar on a div (Facebook style)

This link should get you started. Long story short, a div that has been styled to look like a scrollbar is used to catch click-and-drag events. Wired up to these events are methods that scroll the contents of another div which is set to an arbitrary height and typically has a css rule of overflow:scroll (there are variants on the css rules but you get the idea).

I'm all about the learning experience -- but after you've learned how it works, I recommend using a library (of which there are many) to do it. It's one of those "don't reinvent" things...

Facebook uses a very clever technique I described in context of my scrollbar plugin jsFancyScroll:

The scrolled content is actually scrolled natively by the browser scrolling mechanisms while the native scrollbar is hidden by using overflow definitions and the custom scrollbar is kept in sync by bi-directional event listening.

Feel free to use my plugin for your project: :)

https://github.com/leoselig/jsFancyScroll/

I highly recommend it over plugins such as TinyScrollbar that come with terrible performance issues!

If you're looking for a Facebook like scroll bar, then I'd highly recommend you take a look at this one:

http://rocha.la/jQuery-slimScroll

I solved this problem by adding another div as a sibling to the scrolling content div. It's height is set to the radius of the curved borders. There will be design issues if you have content that you want nudged to the very bottom, or text you want to flow into this new div, etc,. but for my UI this thin div is no problem.

The real trick is to have the following structure:

<div class="window">
 <div class="title">Some title text</div>
 <div class="content">Main content area</div>
 <div class="footer"></div>
</div>

Important CSS highlights:

• Your CSS would define the content region with a height and overflow to allow the scrollbar(s) to appear.
• The window class gets the same diameter corners as the title and footer
• The drop shadow, if desired, is only given to the window class
• The height of the footer div is the same as the radius of the bottom corners

Here's what that looks like: