how to set the vertical scroll bar in firefox to be in the left side ?

Question

i want that the vertical scroll bar that show in textarea in fire fox will show in the left side, i have site with 'rtl' direction, and in IE its o.k , in the left side - (oposide the text).

Answer 1

I agree with Jonathan.. If you want people to use yoyr website dont change the general behavior they are use to. There are so many sites to choose from out there and you will loose to your competition when you pull stunts like this.. However I don't know how it is done...

Answer 2

I wouldn't do it, because it breaks what users expect, but here you go:

1. Enter about:config in the Location bar
2. Type layout.scrollbar.side in the "Filter"
3. Double-click the layout.scrollbar.side preference and change it to 3

Answer 3

Agreeing with the other answers here, I would seriously consider if you'd want to do this (from a ease-of-use standpoint).

That said, even though you got it working in IE, I don't think your use of the RTL setting is correct. I'm not sure the effects it has but I think it's more for allowing users to write in a language that reads/writes right-to-left.

Answer 4

You could always do this with a custom scrollbar which is set to look like the standard one. But as others have said I wouldn't recommend. Changing the UI is this way is on the whole a bad idea.

http://www.kelvinluck.com/assets/jquery/jScrollPane/jScrollPane.html

Answer 5

Hello,
I have the exact same problem and I am also looking for an answer.

All you people who say it is not advised to do, miss one very important fact:
NOT ALL THE WORLD IS ENGLISH SPEAKER!!!
Or left to right for that matter.

some of us read and write from right to left (Arabic, Hebrew and some more i guess)
and we want scroll bars on the left side of our sites for various reasons,
even if you don't have it set in your browser preferences,
because our sites (that could be bilingual) are designed in a certain way.
(Hebrew for example in a site I am working on).

If some one have any idea on how to implement it in Firefox,
I and MANY MORE people would greatly appreciate it.
In IE it is a simple matter of putting an RTL in the tag of your choice,
As a web designer I prefer Firefox so much more
but I don't understand how they excluded that feature >(

Thank you in advance,
Bez.

Answer 6

Firefox considers it a usability feature that a scrollbar appears on the same side all the time for a given user no matter what direction the text in the page uses.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330863

So if your browser is using some RTL language such as Hebrew, then the scrollbars are always on the left, and if your browser is using English then it's always on the right. There is a preference you can set in about:config (layout.scrollbar.side) that overrides this but a web author has no control over it.