Windows – Change color of scrollbar in windows 10

colorscontrastscrollbarstyleswindows 10

I was wondering if it is possible to change the color of the scrollbar in windows 10.

At the moment the color difference between the slider and the background is small enough for me to have to search for it, especially when it is small.

Can this be done natively with windows 10 or if not is there any 3rd party software that I can use to achieve this?

PS, I found this post: How to change the scrollbar color in Windows XP? it seems to be very outdated and the solution looks to be only for winXP, but correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT:
Comments showed that there is no officially supported way by Microsoft. This question is now focused on either MS changing their policy or any unofficial way of solving this problem.

EDIT2: I do know that there is a high contrast mode for windows, but the only thing that I have contrast issues with is scroll bars, as their gray values are very close to each other. It would be totally overkill to use high contrast mode for a small thing like this.

Best Answer

In Windows 7, it was easily possible to customise appearance of every individual screen item (including colours of scrollbars) as explained here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/guides/change_colours/computer/win/win7/index.shtml

In Windows 10, the advanced customization options were removed from the Personalization settings page for some reason.

However, it is still possible to adjust the scrollbar colour in Windows 10, but you have to do the change via Registry:

Open the Registry Editor.
Find the following registry keys:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\Colors
There you have to change the Scrollbar value to any colour you like.

The defaults are: "200 200 200" and "212 208 200", respectively.

You can substitute them with any colour combination "RRR GGG BBB", where RRR/GGG/BBB are all within range 0-255 and represent the red/green/blue colour components, respectively.
Exit the Registry Editor. You will need to log-off and log-in again for the change to take effect.

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Windows – Chrome bookmark bar background with high contrast

If you have found a theme that is almost acceptable but would like to customize it further, this is how you do that in steps.

Step 1 : Allow the viewing of hidden files

In the Control Panel, open File Explorer Options.
Go to the View tab for a list of advanced settings
Under "Hidden files and folders" click "Show hidden files, folders, and drives"
Click OK

Step 2 : Find your theme

Open Windows Explorer
Navigate to C:\Users\[user-name]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Extensions
Sort by date descending the list of folders that have strange names to find your theme (should be the most recent one).

Step 3 : Modify the theme

In the folder of the theme (or a sub-folder), open the file manifest.json in a text editor.

Find the "colors" section which will look like this:

"theme": {
  "colors": {
     "bookmark_text": [ 221, 221, 221 ],

and also :

    "images": {
     "theme_toolbar": "img/toolbar.png"

The color of the bookmarks text is given by "bookmark_text" and the numbers inside the parenthesis contain the RGB values (red, green, blue).
Change the number to the color you like. You may use a color-picker for that (picker1 or picker2 or any other).
If you wish to change the background color of the header, this is unfortunately specified by an image in "theme_toolbar". You could use the Chrome Theme Creator to build another one.
Save your changes and restart Chrome.

I suggest making a copy of the theme's folder before modifying the file manifest.json as a backup.

More information can be found in the articles :

Windows – Chrome Title Bar Color

Try visiting chrome://flags/#windows10-custom-titlebar, and change "Custom-drawn Windows 10 Titlebar" to Disabled.

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