Problems with Div Vertical Scrollbars on Ipad

How to get the scroll bar with CSS overflow on iOS

Edit following the comment left, kindly, by kritzikratzi:

[Starting] with ios 5beta a new property -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch can be added which should result in the expected behaviour.

Some, but very little, further reading:

• Native momentum scrolling in iOS 5

Original answer, left for posterity.

Unfortunately neither overflow: auto, or scroll, produces scrollbars on the iOS devices, apparently due to the screen-width that would be taken up such useful mechanisms.

Instead, as you've found, users are required to perform the two-finger swipe in order to scroll the overflow-ed content. The only reference, since I'm unable to find the manual for the phone itself, I could find is here: tuaw.com: iPhone 101: Two-fingered scrolling.

The only work-around I can think of for this, is if you could possibly use some JavaScript, and maybe jQTouch, to create your own scroll-bars for overflow elements. Alternatively you could use @media queries to remove the overflow and show the content in full, as an iPhone user this gets my vote, if only for the sheer simplicity. For example:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="handheld.css" media="only screen and (max-device width:480px)" />

The preceding code comes from A List Apart, from the same article linked-to above (I'm not sure why they left of the type="text/css", but I assume there are reasons.

iphone safari not showing scroll bars

Overflow is supported in iPhone/iTouch/iPad. Just use 2 fingers (horizontal) to scroll the overflow portion but no scrollbar will be shown. Yeah I know, it sucks. People need to google it to find out...

iPad Safari scrolling causes HTML elements to disappear and reappear with a delay

I was using translate3d before. It produced unwanted results. Basically, it would chop off and not render elements that were offscreen, until I interacted with them. So, basically, in landscape orientation, half of my site that was offscreen was not being shown. This is a iPad web application, owing to which I was in a fix.

Applying translate3d to relatively positioned elements solved the problem for those elements, but other elements stopped rendering, once offscreen. The elements that I couldn't interact with (artwork) would never render again, unless I reloaded the page.

The complete solution:

*:not(html) {
    -webkit-transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0);
}

Now, although this might not be the most "efficient" solution, it was the only one that works. Mobile Safari does not render the elements that are offscreen, or sometimes renders erratically, when using -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch. Unless a translate3d is applied to all other elements that might go offscreen owing to that scroll, those elements will be chopped off after scrolling.

_{(This is the complete answer to my question. I had originally marked Colin Williams' answer as the correct answer, as it helped me get to the complete solution. A community member, @Slipp D. Thompson edited my question, after about 2.5 years of me having asked it, and told me I was abusing SO's Q & A format. He also told me to separately post this as the answer.
@Colin Williams, thank you! The answer and the article you linked out to gave me a lead to try something with CSS. So, thanks again, and hope this helps some other lost soul. This surely helped me big time!)}

CSS - Overflow: Scroll; - Always show vertical scroll bar?

Just ran into this problem myself. OSx Lion hides scrollbars while not in use to make it seem more "slick", but at the same time the issue you addressed comes up: people sometimes cannot see whether a div has a scroll feature or not.

The fix: In your css include -

::-webkit-scrollbar {
  -webkit-appearance: none;
  width: 7px;
}

::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
  border-radius: 4px;
  background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, .5);
  box-shadow: 0 0 1px rgba(255, 255, 255, .5);
}

/* always show scrollbars */
::-webkit-scrollbar {  -webkit-appearance: none;  width: 7px;}
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {  border-radius: 4px;  background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, .5);  box-shadow: 0 0 1px rgba(255, 255, 255, .5);}

/* css for demo */
#container {  height: 4em;  /* shorter than the child */  overflow-y: scroll;  /* clip height to 4em and scroll to show the rest */}
#child {  height: 12em;  /* taller than the parent to force scrolling */}

/* === ignore stuff below, it's just to help with the visual. === */
#container {  background-color: #ffc;}
#child {  margin: 30px;  background-color: #eee;  text-align: center;}

<div id="container">  <div id="child">Example</div></div>