This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
How To: Scroll Bars In Mac OS X Lion
Part of Apple’s new operating system look is the reduced need for scrolling side bars on the right hand side of windows as well as the bottom of a window should the window not be wide enough to present all the information.
Traditionally you would have the up and down and left and right buttons that you could use. You would also have a significant width scroll bar which you could click and drag to move through a document or simply click to jump to an area in a document.
Well these are gone and in place is an invisible scroll bar. By the term invisible I mean they disappear when they are not needed as to limit the visual distraction and loss of screen real estate.
Hence, when you have a long multipage document for example you can simply drag your finger down the track pad or mouse to navigate through the document at which time you will then instantly see the scroll bar appear giving you a visual representation of the location within the document in question.
Upon bringing up the scroll bar you can then also drag your mouse over the area to the right or the bottom of your window and the scroll bar will remain in that position whilst the mouse pointer is moving which will allow you to click to navigate to a set area within the document or you can click and hold the control/navigation bar to move through a document as you wish.
This option however is quite difficult to get used to especially when we have for so many years been used to a larger scroll bar.
Below you will see two examples of how the scroll bars appear in Safari.
The first image shows the control/navigation bar at the top of the page as it is at the beginning of the document we are looking at.
The second image however shows the control/navigation bar further down in the scroll bar with reference to where the current webpage is being viewed.
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