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why do the scroll bars quickly dissapear in firefox on OSX 10.9?

GeorgeRobertson
GeorgeRobertson
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I am running OSX 10.9 Maverick on a Macbook Pro . I observe this problem in Firefox 25.1 The scroll bars in any application window all dissapear after about a second. If you resize the window or select an item with subdirectories in a list, the scroll bar in the pane you are in reappears, but it does not dwell long enough to allow you to move a cursor over it. (What is the point of making it dissapear anyway?) Two finger scrolling does not work for some reason, using a function and direction key or just a direction key works to scroll only in some websites but not all of them. This little bit of cleverness, if intentional is both un-needed and dysfunctional.

I am running OSX 10.9 Maverick on a Macbook Pro . I observe this problem in Firefox 25.1 The scroll bars in any application window all dissapear after about a second. If you resize the window or select an item with subdirectories in a list, the scroll bar in the pane you are in reappears, but it does not dwell long enough to allow you to move a cursor over it. (What is the point of making it dissapear anyway?) Two finger scrolling does not work for some reason, using a function and direction key or just a direction key works to scroll only in some websites but not all of them. This little bit of cleverness, if intentional is both un-needed and dysfunctional.

Chosen solution

On Mac the scroll bars can be hidden and only have them show when you scroll the page so you can see the current scroll position.
The idea is that a touch pad is used that doesn't require the scroll bars to be visible and thus have more screen estate for the browsing area.

You can make the scroll bars always visible:

Read this answer in context 👍 36

All Replies (2)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Chosen Solution

On Mac the scroll bars can be hidden and only have them show when you scroll the page so you can see the current scroll position.
The idea is that a touch pad is used that doesn't require the scroll bars to be visible and thus have more screen estate for the browsing area.

You can make the scroll bars always visible:

GeorgeRobertson
GeorgeRobertson Question owner
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This answer solves the problem for me.

However, it does not address the fact that under Apples OSX 10.9 Maverick, touchpad scrolling currently does not always work, even when you have a touchpad device, and the very latest OS and version of Firefox. The default scroll bar setting for OSX 10.9 ought to be hardware sensitive and set to always on as the default, Other settings might work on an iPad or iPhone device and their competitor clones, I cannot confirm that, but we know that it does not work for all web applications on all touchpad devices. Not even the ones Apple make themselves.