simplebar vs OverlayScrollbars

[punkpeye]

simplebar's documentation mentions that OverlayScrollbars should be preferred for advance use cases.

What's the actual difference between the two?

[KingSora]

Good day @punkpeye

Its possbile that I have a bias in this question since I'm the maintainer of OverlayScrollbars, but I'll try to give an objective answer.

Back in v1 OverlayScrollbars had a larger scope and thus the whole plugin was heavier in size. It offered many "nice to haves" like a advanced scroll function where you could completely customize the scroll coordinates scroll({ x: '100% - 50px', y: myElement }). In comparison Simplebar had always a narrower scope which made the plugin smaller, but als less feature rich. Another big difference was browser support, as OverlayScrollbars offered support for IE8 while Simplebar was designed for modern browsers and polyfills had to be installed by the users themselfes.

As time progressed many things changed.. v2 of OverlayScrollbars follows a new philosophy which is "provide the most important features out of the box and nice to haves as treeshake-able plugins", this also applies to browser support since v2 focuses on modern browsers first and offers backward compatibility via plugins. Another big change was in the quality control area. Since v2 OverlayScrollbars has a big suite of meaningful tests (unit & e2e) which are designed to catch regressions in functionality and performance.

Both libraries are designed to do the same thing, but internally they are doing it differently:

• The markup for the scrollbars is different and also works differently regarding pointer-events which results in different tradeoffs
• OverlayScrollbars change detection & update logic is more sophisticated and configurable (comparison Simplebar vs OverlayScrollbars)
• Simplebar is not using newer browser features like custom-css-properties and ScrollTimelineAPI

Nowadays I'm observing that OverlayScrollbars has the clear edge in regards of quality, features and support, but is also bigger in size to achieve that.

• Simplebar is smaller in size but is offering a limited set of options and styling capabilities
• The Simplebar maintainer doesn't seem be very active in terms of Commits, PRs and Issues
• While Simplebar has tests I find them to be lacking in scope

[punkpeye]

Wow this is really your area of expertise. Very impressive