Remove Scroll Bouncing in Lion

In system pref, Universal Access > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad Options > Scrolling check box (without intertia)

Weird, I just tried it and it works for me - sorry :-(

I tried too and the behavior changed a little, but it still bounces.

Mine is a MacBookPro8,1 (MacBook Pro, Early 2011).

Did you restart your Mac?

The behavior may be unchangable in Safari.

Yes, I did. Changing the 'inertia' option made it scroll 'slower' - for the lack of better word, but bounce was there.

That behavior, I have to honest, is kind of funny on my iPhone, but not on my computer.

It looks like you can get rid of the bouncing effect, unfortunately.

Very unfortunate. This effect is jarring and uncomfortable on the iMac screen. Hopefully this will be fixed in an update very soon.

Don't count on it getting fixed, ever.

But there is a way to squelch it. Just swap your Apple pointing device for any third party mouse. No rubber band effect when scrolling beyond the end when using my 8 year old Logitech USB mouse.

Of course this means that you will be losing all Gesture capability by using a third party mouse. But if you are like me, and you are willing to give up all Gestures to be rid of the rubber band effect, head down to the dollar store and pick up a USB mouse for $5 from the bargain bin.

Tried turning off inertia. That removed the "rolling stop" of my scroll (a feature which I rather enjoy) but it did not remove the rubber band effect. Mail alone has three columns all with the rubber band and I hate seeing my windows bouncing all over the place. Will somebody at apple please put a checkbox in system preferences to toggle rubberband effect on or off. Please.

You can, like many have before you, send Apple a feature request asking for that functionality.

But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

Better yet, abandon your Apple pointing devices and use a $5 USB third party mouse from the bargain bin of your local department store. You will, of course, lose all gesture capability by doing this, but you will be rid of the rubber band effect. Many won't think this is a worthwhile tradeoff to make, but I sure do.

Here is my research from the day.

On iOS, there is a thing called a UIScrollView. Setting bounces to 0 makes the scrolling not bounce.

Lion is different. It uses an NSScrollView. (I just did the research) In it is a property called "Elasticity" which determines this: Allow content to be scrolled past its bounds on this axis in an elastic fashion. Things that scroll generally sit within an NSScrollView on the screen. It turns out the NSScrollElasticity is responsable for that. It's defined in NSScrollView.h.

#if MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_7 <= MAC_OS_X_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED

enum {

NSScrollElasticityAutomatic = 0, // automatically determine whether to allow elasticity on this axis

NSScrollElasticityNone = 1, // disallow scrolling beyond document bounds on this axis

NSScrollElasticityAllowed = 2, // allow content to be scrolled past its bounds on this axis in an elastic fashion

};

If you open this folder, you can see the file on your hard drive.

/System/Library/Frameworks/Appkit.framework/Versions/C/Headers/NSScrollView.h

Dunno if modifying that file would help anything, but in any case, I would love for a preference file (pList) to automatically set all NSScrollViews for an app to use NSScrollView.NSScrollElasticity = NSScrollElasticityNone

I think that would work, but I don't yet know how to do it and do it for all apps.

Alex Zavatone wrote:

Dunno if modifying that file would help anything...

It wouldn't. That header file is what the compiler imports to define how applications control the elasticity, it is not a control on the elasticity itself.