The Persistent Scroll Bars
By default, macOS uses a very modern approach to scroll bars: they are completely invisible until you actually start scrolling. When you swipe two fingers on your trackpad or flick your Magic Mouse, a thin grey bar appears briefly to indicate your position on the page, and then immediately fades away when you stop moving. This maximizes your screen real estate and provides a very clean look.
However, if you are using a traditional, third-party mouse (one with a physical scroll wheel rather than a touch surface), or if you simply prefer the visual cue of always knowing exactly how long a document is before you start reading it, the disappearing scroll bars can be frustrating. You might have previously changed a setting to force the scroll bars to remain permanently visible, but if you want to return to the clean, auto-hiding behavior, you must disable the “Always” option.
How to Enable Auto-Hiding Scroll Bars
You can control the visibility behavior of scroll bars in the Appearance settings.
- Click the Apple Logo in the top-left corner of the menu bar and select System Settings… (or System Preferences).
- Scroll down the left-hand sidebar and click on Appearance (In older macOS versions, this is under General).
- Look for the section labelled Show scroll bars.
- You will see three options: “Automatically based on mouse or trackpad,” “When scrolling,” and “Always.”
- To disable the permanent display, select “Automatically based on mouse or trackpad” (or “When scrolling” if you want them to fade away even when a traditional mouse is plugged in).
Your open windows will immediately update. The thick, grey scroll bars will disappear from the edges of your Safari and Finder windows, returning your Mac to its sleek, default appearance.