How do I get rid of the Windows 11 scroll bars and get the old Windows bars back?

Another reason why Windows 11 is a disastrously bad software is the scroll bars.

It's not just a matter of it being hideous to look at, more importantly it is totally counterintuitive to use. You are constantly maneuvering your mouse to the thin "middle" even though it's enough for the scrolling to begin when your mouse pointer is already hovering over the fat non moving margin around the thin middle bit

But that's not all. The arrows at both the top and bottom ends are completely invisible unless you hover over the scroll bar (!) This means that you never know whether your bar is really at the bottom just by looking at your monitor. Now you have drag your mouse over the bar just to see whether you have really scrolled to the very top of the very bottom. And I have noticed that depending on your window the distance between the very bottom of the scroll bar and the top or bottom end of the moving middle bit is larger or smaller depending on window, so you really can't even just hover to know where you are; but also have to click and drag your scroll bar to either end every single time in order to see where you are precisely. I have already noticed the increased frequency of my scrolling activity.

Who in its right mind thought this was a good idea to add a (over a lifetime millions) of extra additional mouse movements AND clicks that we now are condemned to do?

No way. I don't want to submit myself to this evil and injurious menace. I want the old scroll back, where with just one look which takes less than one second, I know where I am.

@Raiden Go to "Settings" (or press Win+I), Accessibility>Visual Effects, turn on "Always show scrollbar".

I frequently use the wheel feature of pressing down on it to allow movement of the mouse doing the scroll, works in most programs.

Thanks for the heads up — but obviously no solution provided.

I want the old scroll bar. One with all components of it, including end arrows, visible at all times before I even begin to make any motion or click on the touchpad or mouse.

Unfortunately it has been removed (old style "Scrollbar").

In addition to enabling "Always show scrolbars" like how @atinfo has explained, it also is possible for the Scrollbar width and the Scrollbar buttons size to be be adjusted individually.

Raiden said:

Another reason why Windows 11 is a disastrously bad software is the scroll bars.

Click to expand...

It is not a matter of Win 11 is Bad it's just not to your liking
The old ones I thought were better but times move on

The-Hive said:

It is not a matter of Win 11 is Bad it's just not to your liking

Click to expand...

Nope, it's not a zero sum game ("just not liking" something cannot be separated from whether that thing is considered good or bad — in fact it's deeply intertwined. Window s 11 is a barely beta tested, rushed out low-rent Mac-OS knockoff. Apple continues to be the most valuable company on the planet fattening its shareholders, so the ones who own Microsoft must have increased their bullying of MS nerds, for them to come out with this.

Between Page Up, Page Down, ▲, ▼, Speed-wheel, Auto-scroll, Two Fingered scroll and other Touch Pad gestures..., I seldom go near the scroll bar area.

Hi,
I just don't like when they disappear because they don't always show back up with mouse movement especially the windows settings and if there is content lower on the page a scroll bar shows there it at a glance

No scroll bar no way to know unless text is cut in half on the bottom.

It's not bad. It's just not to my liking the fact that it's a spaghetti, but a month from now I'll be having 32 good years of experience at polishing a spaghetti.

Wow could you find a bigger image lol

ThrashZone said:

Wow could you find a bigger image lol

Click to expand...

It's so ppl can zoom in and use their narrow scrollbars to read the "everything old is new again" part.

hdmi said:

It's not bad. It's just not to my liking the fact that it's a spaghetti, but a month from now I'll be having 32 good years of experience at polishing a spaghetti.

Click to expand...

Did you know that if you click on an image while composing your post then you get the option to set its display size?

@Raiden Don't forget Windows 10 was in the same state when it was first released, it took a long time to get it to where it is today

Bree said:

Did you know that if you click on an image while composing your post then you get the option to set its display size?

Click to expand...

Yeah, but I couldn't make it bigger.

The-Hive said:

... Windows 10 was in the same state when it was first released...

Click to expand...

I don't remember W10 being quite as terrible as this!

No I think your right, but it was pretty ropey after 7 which was highly polished

The-Hive said:

it was pretty ropey after 7 which was highly polished

Click to expand...

You got a point there!

You guys use Bleachbit?

Try it. It gets worse: you have no idea there there is a scroll bar to the right: it doesn't show up when you hover over it. Mouse wheel over the whole area doesn't scrull up the screen either (not while Bleachbit is busy). But if you know the scrollbar is there then you can hover to the right and hard click a couple of times and then the invisible (invisible despite me having my Windows Accessability's "make always visible" switch turned on) Bleachbit scroll bar showed up and moves... You have to be an old user like me (who used Bleachbit before Windows 11 ever showed up) in order to know that there should be a scroll bar at all.

This is what the bottom right looks like regardless of whether you move your mouse arrow or roll the wheel or not:




So imagine if I didn't know the program enough? Then I would have never ever known there was something to scroll here. Since both mouse-hover and mouse-wheel movement often never prioritizes above whatever background process is going on with the concerning application. Mouse-movement is a "softer" process that is inherently less prioritized than a mouseclick. The "geniuses" at Windows 11's Fluent Design bureau never took that into account when they came up with the new scrollbar. That's why if you ignore the visual cues and simply click repeatedly on the edge on the right, the scrollbar will eventually show up. But in order to think that you'd first have to know the software enough. If yer not familiar with the software then all you'll conclude will be that that's all there is to see in front of you. So if you never get to see scrollbars then you'd never get to scroll at all (and it's only the users of touch pad (like phones and tablets) that have the ingrained habit of moving their figners over a screen even if there is nothing to scroll. Because touch-movement happens to be a "hard" rather than a "soft" priority so you're likely to swipe on a screen regardless of whether you see a scroll bar or not. But this habit doesn't exist in the "mouse world" and can't exist because mouse movents (both the arrow moving around or the wheel scrolling the pages) are "soft" actions and therefore often they aren't prioritized above other ongoing processes. So it's very much possible that I had probably downloaded and opened (new for me) application programs and never seen a scroll bar that was there hidden, and therefore never thought of scrolling down the page to see and inform myself more.

Thanks Microsoft for this "service" of making the OS less user friendly and more mysterious.