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> For designers accustomed to Mac environments but designing multi-platform web experiences, trying to make everyone happy in a way that doesn’t place a lot of

> For designers accustomed to Mac environments but designing multi-platform web experiences, trying to make everyone happy in a way that doesn’t place a lot of performance burden on the end user can be tricky. Or you could just leave things at their defaults and stop messing with native chrome and UI elements. Now that you've styled it "unobtrusively" for Windows, that's one UI element that's completely inconsistent with the rest of the OS, and for what purpose? Does a usable user interface element actually need to be a tiny capsule because that's what Apple does?

simias 7y ago
I agree with the sentiment but the web is so ridiculously inconsistent already that drawing the line to styling scrollbars feels pointless to me. This was your monthly "the web was a mistake, gopher should've won" propaganda message. You can now return to your 30MB React.js project.
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  If gopher had a way to send a request with a body it could have done better, I think. You can't build a BBS/Forum with just gopher.
- dmix 7y ago
  The question is about what’s consistent for the user not the application developer
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - tetraca 7y ago
    Gopher was arguably more consistent in both regards. But pretty vs functional wasn't even a tradeoff you could really consider.
    - dmix 7y ago
      The protocols certainly influence the designs but there’s always a level of flexibility in the clients (ie, browsers) which the app devs will still have to wrangle. Some devs value consistency across platforms so their app always looks and functions the same. But I personally think it’s best to default to the system’s UI. Sure I can make it look Mac-esque on desktop Firefox on Windows but I’d rather it look and function exactly like every other windowed application they use on the platform. There’s also nothing inherent in using JS heavy frontends like React which encourages non-standard browser behaviour. You can still present complex interactive elements while keeping scrolling and other usability stuff like back buttons, copy/pasting, form input behaviour (not breaking LastPass and browser autocomplete for ex), not losing form data on submit after validation errors, etc. You have to go out of your way to explicitly modify default browser behaviour, usually via 3rd party libraries added on to these frameworks. Personally I found it was far more common in the jQuery world, which is still rampant among those awful prebuilt themes people and companies always use for their websites.
- peterkelly 7y ago
  To be fair, if Gopher had won then the industry would surely have found a way to make it as shitty as the web is now.
cm2187 7y ago
Knowing that even if the hack works now it could break on future versions of the browser or different OS. So that also assumes the website will be an actively developped website forever.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  > Knowing that even if the hack works now it could break on future versions of the browser or different OS. So that also assumes the website will be an actively developped website forever. This rather is a hack to make your job much more secure.
rndgermandude 7y ago
When you have a dark-theme-ish website, then the bright scrollbars suck, especially if you got more than one (e.g. two scrollable columns). So you need to do something or else a lot of users will complain or just leave.
WorldMaker 7y ago
It's also a fun bit of "everything old is new again". The scrollbar color CSS this points out for Firefox originated somewhere in IE 3-6 when Windows 9X was briefly encouraging fun with scrollbar colors to better match content and there was a lot of applications that did so on Windows (it was the early WinAMP, Napster, etc era). Other platforms complained about how "tacky" such CSS was, and by the time Firefox implemented it most people thought it was a bad idea of the BLINK/MARQUEE school. It's almost strange this time to see it from the other direction of macOS web devs wanting more Mac-like scroll bars everywhere.
phponpcp 7y ago
Obtrusive scroll bars by default screw up certain CSS rules like 100vw. So that's why it matters.
- pixelbath 7y ago
  I've seen you post this particular issue twice in this thread. Perhaps it's not the scrollbars' fault that setting an element's width to 100vw (which is 100% of viewport width) usually requires a scroll? The scrollbars are a symptom that you are setting your child element width too high. Try 100% instead, which should make it 100% of the parent size. If your intent is to set an element to 100% viewport width with no scrollbar, that's trivially easy to do without jacking around with scrollbar styles.

simias 7y ago

I agree with the sentiment but the web is so ridiculously inconsistent already that drawing the line to styling scrollbars feels pointless to me. This was your monthly "the web was a mistake, gopher should've won" propaganda message. You can now return to your 30MB React.js project.

jimktrains2 7y ago
If gopher had a way to send a request with a body it could have done better, I think. You can't build a BBS/Forum with just gopher.
dmix 7y ago
The question is about what’s consistent for the user not the application developer
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tetraca 7y ago
  Gopher was arguably more consistent in both regards. But pretty vs functional wasn't even a tradeoff you could really consider.
  - dmix 7y ago
    The protocols certainly influence the designs but there’s always a level of flexibility in the clients (ie, browsers) which the app devs will still have to wrangle. Some devs value consistency across platforms so their app always looks and functions the same. But I personally think it’s best to default to the system’s UI. Sure I can make it look Mac-esque on desktop Firefox on Windows but I’d rather it look and function exactly like every other windowed application they use on the platform. There’s also nothing inherent in using JS heavy frontends like React which encourages non-standard browser behaviour. You can still present complex interactive elements while keeping scrolling and other usability stuff like back buttons, copy/pasting, form input behaviour (not breaking LastPass and browser autocomplete for ex), not losing form data on submit after validation errors, etc. You have to go out of your way to explicitly modify default browser behaviour, usually via 3rd party libraries added on to these frameworks. Personally I found it was far more common in the jQuery world, which is still rampant among those awful prebuilt themes people and companies always use for their websites.
peterkelly 7y ago
To be fair, if Gopher had won then the industry would surely have found a way to make it as shitty as the web is now.

cm2187 7y ago

Knowing that even if the hack works now it could break on future versions of the browser or different OS. So that also assumes the website will be an actively developped website forever.

wolfgke 7y ago
> Knowing that even if the hack works now it could break on future versions of the browser or different OS. So that also assumes the website will be an actively developped website forever. This rather is a hack to make your job much more secure.

rndgermandude 7y ago

When you have a dark-theme-ish website, then the bright scrollbars suck, especially if you got more than one (e.g. two scrollable columns). So you need to do something or else a lot of users will complain or just leave.

WorldMaker 7y ago

It's also a fun bit of "everything old is new again". The scrollbar color CSS this points out for Firefox originated somewhere in IE 3-6 when Windows 9X was briefly encouraging fun with scrollbar colors to better match content and there was a lot of applications that did so on Windows (it was the early WinAMP, Napster, etc era). Other platforms complained about how "tacky" such CSS was, and by the time Firefox implemented it most people thought it was a bad idea of the BLINK/MARQUEE school. It's almost strange this time to see it from the other direction of macOS web devs wanting more Mac-like scroll bars everywhere.

phponpcp 7y ago

Obtrusive scroll bars by default screw up certain CSS rules like 100vw. So that's why it matters.

pixelbath 7y ago
I've seen you post this particular issue twice in this thread. Perhaps it's not the scrollbars' fault that setting an element's width to 100vw (which is 100% of viewport width) usually requires a scroll? The scrollbars are a symptom that you are setting your child element width too high. Try 100% instead, which should make it 100% of the parent size. If your intent is to set an element to 100% viewport width with no scrollbar, that's trivially easy to do without jacking around with scrollbar styles.