And don't forget an immediate visual indicator of the total length of the document. I feel like scroll bars have really matured to the point of being almost pe

And don't forget an immediate visual indicator of the total length of the document. I feel like scroll bars have really matured to the point of being almost perfect. The only things I can think of to really change (looking at the scroll bars on this window right now) are: 1. disappear when content fits in the window instead of grayed out scroll bars; and 2. Get rid of the vestigial up and down arrow buttons. Last time I saw something really horrible done with scroll bars was in Google Wave. What a disaster. Here I feel like Apple seems to be having issues because they're trying to form a consistency between iOS and OSX, but there's an inherent tension in that iOS is a direct manipulation metaphor, and OSX can't really be. It goes both ways. On iOS, they're running out of input bandwidth that's strictly metaphorical, so they're now resorting to gestures, which are out of metaphor and not discoverable. On OSX Lion, scrolling is immediately inconsistent with iOS, because, of course, it's not a direct manipulation metaphor, so there's already an extra level of abstraction, and you scroll with two fingers instead of with one. Because of that level of abstraction, the direction is basically arbitrary, though I suppose it makes it slightly more consistent with iOS, in that you're (in a +1 remove) pulling on the content like in iOS, instead of pulling on the scroll bar. But not showing the scroll bar by default is especially weird to me, in that the constraint for iOS--screen real estate--doesn't really exist on a desktop environment. Why not provide that information, then? Consistency over usability is my guess. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."