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I wish the same thing, but for desktop applications too. There are some that implement their own scroll and it's the most annoying thing ever, because it makes
by DiThi 10y ago
I wish the same thing, but for desktop applications too. There are some that implement their own scroll and it's the most annoying thing ever, because it makes the scroll bar unusable. As the article point out, it's vastly different than scroll wheel, touch and keys.
Scroll bars provides 3 different scroll methods:
- Click and drag scroll thingy. The most used method, but sometimes misunderstood. It should scroll only as much as you moved the mouse. It wreaks havoc with endless scroll pages.
- Click on the bar outside the thingy. This used to be equivalent to pgdown/pgup. It was the method I used the most, and I was infuriated countless times when it behave differently: on some platforms it means "go here".
- Arrow buttons. Not very useful and virtually extinct at this point.
- mariusmg 10y agoYou forgot Space key which is by far the best way when reading long texts.
- afandian 10y agoAgreed. I have a great Apple mouse and trackpad. But I still use space when scrolling. Lots of know-it-all web developers hijack scrolling and unsurprisingly don't know that you can scroll with space. The OS developers have thought about accessibility.
- pimlottc 10y agoNear-ubiquitous floating headers (and even footers) have made full-page spacebar scrolling practically useless on most pages for me now, at least under Chrome on OSX. You always have to scroll back a little bit to see a line or two of content.
- meej 10y agoThis bookmarklet helps a lot with this: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ What's frustrating is that this is a solvable problem. I've seen sites that have fixed it, and fixed it well. But they are vanishingly rare. So I will just keep killing their sticky headers and footers...
- pimlottc 10y agoYou're right, some sites manage to do it without breaking full page scrolling. One of these days I'd like to sit down and figure out the specifics (of both right and wrong ways) and write a good comprehensive medium post with clear instructions on doing persistent headers correctly. Of course if someone else beats me to it, that's fine too...
- boomlinde 10y agoThe space key is not part of the scroll bar, so in the context of listing ways that a scroll bar can be used it wasn't forgotten but simply left out.
- myfonj 10y ago- Click and hold outside the thingy usually performs consecutive page jumps to the point (Firefox, Chrome) Few omitted means to scroll - hold middle mouse button and drag (this usually works well sideways and in case no scroll bar is present) - spacebar / shift+spacebar, pgUp / pgDn, home / end - and FMoPW most importantly clicking the arrows in the scroll bar. For "us" this seems almost uncomprehensible, but I regularly see users perform scolling this way. For example my wife with track pad (yes, it is capable of two finger gestures), and my mother even with mouse with scroll wheel, until recently. No wonder, discoverability of that action is way above all that abstract "dragging", "swinging" and "pressing" concepts without direct visual clue.
- binaryjason 10y agoshift+spacebar, you just changed my way scrolling on Mac keyboard
- chrisbuc 10y agoArrow buttons. I pretty much only use arrow buttons to scroll screens of text into my eyeline. I get really annoyed when arrow buttons are overloaded to tab between screen elements instead of scrolling (my online banking site, I'm looking at you!)
- DiThi 10y agoI mean the buttons in the GUI scroll bar, that have little arrows or triangles in them. They're way too small and too far apart to be used effectively. For that reason some UI toolkits had both buttons together at the bottom.
- codedokode 10y agoCustom scrollbar implementations also often ignore scrolling speed set in OS's settings.
- shultays 10y agoThere was also right clicking on bar background and clicking "scroll here" on the menu. Imagine how many times this feature is used in whole history!