ubuntu-overlay-scrollbars set to false shows no arrows in several cases

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I still have this issue in 13.10.

It's not mentioned here, but there is another significant usability issue with the non-overlay scrollbars. When you click on an area above/below the scroller widget, it jumps to that location in the document instead of scrolling up/down by one page. Traditionally the jump action is only taken if you middle-click.

As mentioned in this bug, Firefox is a good resource for verifying what the normal, standard appearance and behaviour for scrollbars are.

fyi: http://askubuntu.com/questions/34214/how-do-i-disable-overlay-scrollbars

Just disabling or removing the overlay-scrollbars as described by the other answers will get you back the scroll bars, but they will be missing the stepper buttons at the end of the bars because they have been disabled in the Ambiance theme. To re-enable them, put the following in the ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file:

style "default" {
  engine "murrine" {
    stepperstyle = 0
  }
}

and the following into the file ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css:

.scrollbar {
  -GtkScrollbar-has-backward-stepper: 1;
  -GtkScrollbar-has-forward-stepper: 1;
}

Usually, restarting the applications is enough for the changes to apply.

To make the stepper buttons better-looking, add this to .scrollbar: -GtkRange-slider-width: 16; -GtkRange-stepper-size: 17; – Håkon A. Hjortland Aug 21 '12 at 7:56