[Solved] Firefox scrollbar arrows vanished -- again

[SilenceIsG0lden]

Oy, I'm really getting tired of programmers deciding to take away functional design elements "because they don't look so pretty." How about usability? I know I'm not the only one who uses a computer, with a keyboard and a mouse -- FOR WORK! Every other update we have to find out again how to set the scrollbar to a usable width and make the vanished arrow buttons reappear.

I've tried all the various previously working options, but no luck this time. I'm on Firefox ESR (chosen in hope these nonsense changes wouldn't affect it!) 91.9. The hacks to the gtk.css are being ignored the same way as the settings in about:config that relate to the scrollbar buttons.

Anyone have an idea? Please!

[AZgl1800]

I'm using FF 100.0.2 MINT

and so far, none of my personal choices have disappeared,
attached is a pix of this screen and note the Wide Scroll Bar

[SilenceIsG0lden]

It's debatable what constitutes wide scrollbars - yours would be barely manageable for me, and I set mine wider.

However, I don't see any arrows either on your screenshot. Maybe you missed that my question was about the arrows and not the scrollbar itself?

[pdc_2]

Hi there Silence;

to what extent might the help pages of Mozilla; and its forums, be of possible value to you?

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/forums/

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/produ ... port-forum

It must be very annoying and irritating what you are experiencing

[pdc_2]

as I look into this more, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/711267 suggested that the Ubuntu user ask on those forums; this led me to

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1052100 ... untu-18-04

nothing straightforward here: one needs to lift the hood (bonnet?) and start tinkering

you can see in the final entry; fumble fingers said

I think this answer is outdated. I had a problem with scrollbar height as well as width, in Mint 20.1, LibreOffice Base - it was simply too small for me to pick up and drag with my mouse pointer. I started by making the change under GUI control (from "Themes" menu option), but that was no good because I could only make the scrollbar wider (the height was still too small, presumably because that scales inversely with "number of records"). But I ignored 3 repeated scrollbar slider - cinnamon-settings-generated - do not edit lines in ./config/gtk-3.0 and all is fine!

the file to edit is

gtk-widgets.css

...... I verified that we have the same file; and it is in

/usr/share/themes/Mint-X [YOUR THEME HERE]/gtk-3.0/

this second to last answer commends you to read http://twicetwo.com/blog/linux/gtk/them ... ation.html

I would greatly fear tinkering with these settings; lest things become unreadable; perhaps searching through the threads on this Mint forum might show you some who have attempted already to travel this path

[AZgl1800]

It's debatable what constitutes wide scrollbars - yours would be barely manageable for me, and I set mine wider.

However, I don't see any arrows either on your screenshot. Maybe you missed that my question was about the arrows and not the scrollbar itself?

maybe your view of the screenshot did not come out as mine is, the bar measures 0.375 inches on my screen.

[TheyLive]

I use big scroll buttons
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ll-buttons

[ajgreeny]

I'm also using FF 100.0.2 and still have scrollbars and buttons showing but now only when I put the cursor into that right hand edge of the window do they show as they should; at other times it is narrow. This is the only difference from FF99 when the scrollbar was always visible.

I have made several changes ro the about:config settings and also have a .config/gtk3.0/gtk.css file which gives these changes.

I use the xfce version but I'm not using that at the moment so will try to show my configurations later to see if they help you.

[Cosmo.]

Open the settings in FF and scroll near the bottom. There you find a setting to always show the scrollbars. Activate it.

[ajgreeny]

Thanks Cosmo.

That must be a new Settings option which I've never seen before. I did find another way to achieve the same effect in the about:config page by changing widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled from true to to false.

[Cosmo.]

Read https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/1 ... easenotes/

[ajgreeny]

Read https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/1 ... easenotes/

Interesting, but how many users read the release notes when a new version of FF appears?

I have to admit that I don't; perhaps I should!

[Cosmo.]

Interesting, but how many users read the release notes when a new version of FF appears?

Too few, and not only in case of FF-updates.

On the one side: who does not read, must learn some things on the hard way. This is everybody own decision.

On the other side: The software developers should invest more of their time to think about, how important changes can be provided more prominently. This would help more than changes like this one. Really: I did not wait for this "feature".

[ajgreeny]

Nor me!

Didn't wait for it, didn't want it!

[pbear]

Don't have steppers (aka scrollbar arrows) in Cinn 20.1, notwithstanding having a gtk.css file enabling them. Always worked, until now. For that matter, still works in other apps (e.g., LibreOffice), just not in Firefox.

Firefox in Windows does still have the steppers, by the way.

[Edit to correct typo, 21.1 > 20.1. Thanks Cosmo.)

[Cosmo.]

Cinn 21.1

Oops, so far in the future. It seems to take tens of years to get Cinnamon 21.x and even Mint 21.1 is not even in development. (Typos happen )

Besides that: Removing the steppers was one of the most silliest design decisions, is is especially true if you use a touchpad and not a physical mouse.

[SilenceIsG0lden]

Thank you all for taking the time to look into this; it is very much appreciated!
Just to reiterate: I managed to have a wide enough scrollbar, that wasn't the issue, it's only about the scrollbar ARROWS or buttons or steppers, or whatever they might call them now -- it is infuriating how much TPTB at FF try to do away with all the on-screen navigation options. Whatever happened to letting us decide what we want / need? Why can't this just be an option for those of us who want it? I can't imagine it's difficult to keep up with, from a programming point of view.

Btw, I know of the other discussions about this issue on this forum, like viewtopic.php?f=47&t=330849 and also tried what was discussed there.

@TheyLive: The "Top and Bottom scroll buttons" add-on isn't really that helpful to me, as I am specifically interested in scrolling down pages, not just jumping to the top and bottom. Back in Windows-world I had my Logitech trackball's buttons all set up to do that, but I can't get it sorted under Linux. (I spent like a week trying to map the buttons, to no avail.) I also tried various add-ons, but they didn't help either.

As an aside: I do read release notes; as a matter of fact, I won't update before I check what's been changed.

@ajgreeny: I'd really be interested in your tweaks; as I said, I tried pretty much all the different settings (and combinations of settings) I could find anyone talking about. I'm using cinnamon -- but would that make a difference? I've read people having issues with just any Firefox 91+ on any Ubuntu flavor having problems getting the buttons/arrows back.
In addition to the previously-working additions to the gtk.css file, as mentioned, I have in about:config:
widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.allow-buttons set to true
I can't find anything else that seems to relevant.

[SilenceIsG0lden]

Just found this addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... l-buttons/
and will now mark the topic as solved (though it isn't, not at all).

Will go and buy the dev of the add-on Scroll Anywhere https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... l_anywhere a coffee -- latest version ACTUALLY WORKS in FF in Linux, with my trackball mouse. YAY!

[pbear]

Perhaps you're aware but simply haven't mentioned, but there's a pretty simple workaround for no-steppers in Firefox, as the arrow keys move the window up or down one line at a time per press, which is what the steppers do. I'd miss steppers much more when editing documents.

ETA: Didn't notice the reference to widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.allow-buttons previously, but it's mentioned by ajgreeny in a recent post at Ubuntu Forum. FWIW, when I flip that to true, my gtk.css file works and I now get scroll arrows (steppers) in Firefox.

[SilenceIsG0lden]

@pbear Thank you so much for coming back with this suggestion!

Now it's really solved: I just copied the part relating to the steppers from the link to the Ubuntu forum you gave into my gtk.css -- and now it works! All the other changes in about:config hadn't done anything.

I would love to know why there has to be this stupid game of hiding what we need to achieve our improved usability goals -- for instance, the old part that I deleted before copying the text (see above) had "= true" instead of "= 1" as it is now.

Btw, I do know about arrow key buttons on my keyboard and I make frequent use of keyboard shortcuts (harking back to my old DOS days...), but there are instances where I want the scrollbar and the buttons -- and, seriously, we're going in the wrong direction limiting the options to navigate. Hello accessibility, anyone? If they want to hide things by default, go ahead, but to make it close to impossible to get them back? Why? Power trip?