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This idea is for having scrollbars auto-hide when the window does not receive user interaction.

In the classical approach, when the content's size exceeds that of the viewing area, space is reserved for scrollbars.



In most viewing scenarios, scrollbars are only used briefly and sparingly, if at all, thus making their reserved space go to waste. In addition, the viewer ends up with the situation where, although there is enough space for the actual content, due to that reserved space, a new horizontal scrollbar appears, as a result trimming even more of the valuable viewing area, as seen above.

In the recent trend of maximising space efficiency, especially with the advent of netbooks, it's important to rethink this ubiquitous UI element. The below mockup shows a solution that removes the need to reserve space for scrollbars, without compromising their functionality and usefulness.



During inactivity, while the window can still be in focus, all enabled scrollbars are hidden. Any sort of user interaction involving the mouse, like hovering over the window or scrolling with the wheel (but not entering text on fields), will cause the scrollbars to fade in, showing the current position in the document, although remain translucent to prevent completely occluding the underlying content. Shortly after activity ceases, they fade out again. When the mouse hovers over a scrollbar, that becomes opaque and allows normal interaction. It remains so until the mouse moves away from it.

A situation arises when a scrollbar may block an interactive element, such as a link or button. To avoid this, have a modifier key (e.g. shift) hide the scrollbars. The scrollbars remain hidden until the modifier is released.

N.B. the modifier prevents 'activity' from causing the scrollbars to appear. The pervasiveness of this approach would make this feature easy to discover.

I think that only the actually draggable bar should be shown (as a position reference) while scrolling with the keyboard or the mouse wheel. This is with no scroll buttons and no background.

Hovering near the scrollbar should bring the buttons and background for giving the current move/jump functionality.

Maybe the full scrollbar can be always transparent, and only the draggable part should be visible/invisible based on user's preferences?

The idea is bad for cases, where some button are overlapped by scrollbar. Better idea was introduced in Ubuntu.