How to Restore Full Classic Scrollbars in Opera Web Browser

If you want to disable the new minimal and overlay scrollbar and restore full classic scrollbar in Opera web browser, this article will help you.

Newer versions of Opera web browser (Opera 100 and later) come with a new redesigned UI called “Opera One“. The new user interface or theme provides enhanced look-n-feel and various new features such as tab islands, Aria AI, etc.

Opera One UI in Opera 100.0 and later versions also comes with redesigned scrollbar which is displayed at the right-side when the user visits a webpage. In older versions of Opera browser, the native or full scrollbar was used by the web browser but now Opera uses its own built-in scrollbar which is very minimal and follows the design principles of Opera One UI.

Following image shows the new Opera One scrollbar and full classic scrollbar in previous Opera web browser versions side-by-side:

As you can see in the above image, the new Opera One scrollbar is very minimal and displays as a thin vertical line. On the other hand, the classic scrollbar is displayed in full form without any fancy or minimal effects.

Many Opera users do not like the new appearance of scrollbar and want to bring back the old classic scrollbar in their web browser. Fortunately, Opera team has provided a hidden secret preference/flag which can be used to enable or disable the new refreshed scrollbar in Opera browser.

If you also want to disable the new redesigned Opera One scrollbar and restore full classic scrollbar in Opera web browser, following steps will help you:

STEP 1: Launch Opera web browser and type opera://flags in address bar and press Enter. It’ll open the hidden secret advanced configuration page called “Experiments“.

STEP 2: Now click inside “Search flags” text box and type scrollbar. It’ll show following option in the result:

STEP 3: To disable the new minimal scrollbar and bring back classic scrollbar, select “Disabled” from the drop-down box.

If you want to enable the new minimal scrollbar, select “Enabled” from the drop-down box.

STEP 4: Opera will ask you to restart the browser. Click on “Relaunch now” button to restart Opera.

That’s it. The new or old scrollbar will be activated in your Opera web browser based on the selected preference value.

PS: In future, if you decide to restore default settings, set the above mentioned flag value to Default again.

BONUS TIP:

While searching for scrollbar on opera://flags page, you’ll also see following preferences/flags:

• Overlay Scrollbars
• Fluent Overlay scrollbars
• Fluent scrollbars

These flags are disabled by default. You can enable them to activate the native Windows 11 style overlay scrollbars in Opera web browser.

To learn more about overlay scrollbars, check out following articles:

[Tip] Enable / Disable Windows 11 Style Overlay Scrollbars in Mozilla Firefox

[Tip] Enable Windows 11 Style Overlay Scrollbars in Microsoft Edge