Turn Off Irritating “Rubber-Band” Scrolling

You might have noticed that if you scroll to the top or bottom of a document or web page within some OS X apps like TextEdit, the page continues to scroll a little into a boundary area, before springing back. This is known as rubber- band scrolling and, depending on your point of view, can be rather annoying.

Deactivating Rubber-Band Scrolling in Most OS X Apps

To turn it off in most applications, all you need to do is open a Terminal window (open Finder, select the Applications list, and then in the list of applications double-click Terminal within the Utilities folder), and type the following, before logging out and back in again:

defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -int 0

To reactivate rubber-band scrolling, should you ever want to, again open a Terminal window, and type the following:

defaults delete -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding

Log back out and in again for the changes to take effect.

Deactivating for iTunes

The previous method works for most OS X apps, although Safari and iTunes are two exceptions. It appears it’s impossible to turn it off in Safari, but you can disable rubber-band scrolling iTunes by quitting the iTunes if it’s open and then opening Terminal and typing the following:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes disable-elastic-scroll -bool YES

Should you decide you’d like to reactivate rubber-band scrolling in iTunes, you should quit the app and then use the following command within Terminal:

defaults delete com.apple.iTunes disable-elastic-scroll