22 ms·

Apple has gone to extraordinary lengths to make scroll bars invisible

590 points by edward 6y ago

throw7 6y ago
The mistake Apple made was that they should have made them candy coated.
FreakyT 6y ago
An interesting output of this is, if you keep scrollbars visible, you'll find that a lot of websites end up with weird extra scrollbars on random elements. What often causes this is some HTML element overflowing by one pixel, but no one saw it during the QA process because all the webdevs were using Macs, which have invisible scrollbars by default. I always enable visible scrollbars on my dev computers specifically so I can catch problems like this.
- erwinh 6y ago
  mac user & web dev here, I often employ a trick where I wrap my scrolling div in another div which has overflow hidden just to hide the scrollbar. QA & usability engineers must hate me :p
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > QA & usability engineers must hate me :p "Hate" is a strong work, but humble users like myself also dislike you (or rather, your choices).
  - distalx 6y ago
    How? can you please share some example?
  - ShroudedNight 6y ago
    This comes across as smugly prideful at being explicitly user-hostile. What's the upside here?
  - deft 6y ago
    Why? Stop making bad software and laughing about how it screws people over.
- trinovantes 6y ago
  I've seen so many broken web components do this: 1. Hover over an element that enables the visibility of something else 2. Trigger an overflow and cause scrollbar to show up 3. Scrollbar shifts the original element 4. Original element is no longer being hovered so new element gets hidden 5. Scrollbar disappears and original element moves back 6. Repeat
  - squaresmile 6y ago
    Hah if your Github repo name is at the right length, you'll get that bug with the fork pop-up window. [0] https://i.imgur.com/dS5acnx.gifv https://i.imgur.com/dS5acnx.gifv The gif doesn't have enough fps. IRL the animation is about 10x faster than that so there's no time to click the username. Reported it but the support agent couldn't reproduce ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- scabbycakes 6y ago
  I call it Made-By-A-Macitis because it's so common in this industry since MBP's are issued by default almost in web dev companies, which inevitably leads to weird scrollbars here and there on their startup websites until someone else finally reports it or a dev finally breaks down and tests it on any other non-Apple device.
  - FireBeyond 6y ago
    Remember all the "Made for / Works Best in Internet Explorer" buttons from the early 90s/early 00s? We've gone through a long period of "Works on my Safari".
  - markogresak 6y ago
    > dev finally breaks down and tests it on any other non-Apple device Why the need for an extra device? There's a setting in the System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: "Always". Or it will automatically show scroll bars if you're using a mouse. If you're a web developer and your target audience is not limited to only macOS and mobile, you should have the Show scroll bars set to Always. I'm using a mbp for most of my web dev career and I've always caught these bugs during development. What I do agree is that Windows or Linux makes this setting a default, which makes it more obvious. While testing on different devices is always better, it's not necessary to catch these trivial problems.
- preommr 6y ago
  > * { overflow: hidden } defeated dev noises
  - brockwhittaker 6y ago
    but actually this is the worst possible solution to this and causes tons of issues.
- jacurtis 6y ago
  I honestly think that this is the main reason that Apple hides scrollbars by default. I have turned on "always visible" scrollbars before and it really does ruin the internet experience. Now I'm not sure if you blame the OS maker (Apple/Microsoft), the browser makers (Apple again, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla), or the web developers of the websites. But regardless of who accepts or deserves the blame, it is hard to dispute that the experience is far worse with scrollbars forced always on. It shouldn't be this way, but as of right now, it ruins the experience. Like you mentioned, some websites simply don't work or don't work how they should. You end up with scrollbars on elements that aren't even form fields because of weird hacks that web developers are doing with overflow elements or strange CSS anomalies. I'm not sure how you address this issue. But it is definitely more deeply seeded than the OS level, and I think web developers (a lot of us here) should take some of the responsibility for ruining scrollbars. It is our company's apps and sites that drove Apple to this decision. I suspect that one of the reasons for hidden scrollbars by default is because the teams at Apple have tried to use the web with "always-on" scrollbars and didn't want their users experiencing the web that way. Remember also that defaults are important. Most people will never change the setting, even if it was obnoxious. Most Mac users are going to use the default setting, regardless of whether the default is always on, always off, or auto. Whatever the default is, that will be how most people use the computer and just accept it as "how it works". So Apple has to choose the best option (between three bad choices) that will best best for MOST people. Not everyone, but MOST. I also think that MOST people are used to automatic scroll bars at this point. Again, my Mom is the person that will never change a setting. So she will always use whatever the default is. And she is used to automatic scrollbars. She knows that if she wants to see the scrollbars, she has to do a micro-flick of the scrollwheel (or her finger on mobile/touch) to reveal the scrollbar. It requires minimal-to-no effort and most people have grown accustomed to it now. Is it flawless? No. But I do think it is the best option MOST of the time.
  - jakub_g 6y ago
    > I have turned on "always visible" scrollbars before and it really does ruin the internet experience. You have scrollbars everywhere precisely because they're hidden from developers who don't even know about them, and it seems ~all developers use Macs for web dev those days.
- apocalyptic0n3 6y ago
  > no one saw it during the QA process because all the webdevs were using Macs, which have invisible scrollbars by default. We've had this happen numerous times in the past. As a result, I had to make it mandatory that devs on my team and the QA team have scrollbars always on on their Macs. They get frustrated that I require it but it catches so many minor layout issues that it's worth it.
mrtranscendence 6y ago
This is annoying in macOS, but I do prefer having no scrollbars in iOS. There's limited screen real estate, and messing with a scrollbar with my finger doesn't feel any better than just scrolling to where I want to be.
- _Microft 6y ago
  Learning never stops! I did not not know that you could actually use iOS scrollbars as real scrollbars. They are extremely fiddly indeed but I am pretty sure I am going to use them from time to time. I always thought they were simply a sort of dumb progress bar.
smoe 6y ago
> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this as opposed to some design lead at Apple pushing a weird personal preference for tidyness on their entire user base Maybe I don't understand completely what he is referring to, but on mobile I certainly prefer having a bit more space than a always visible scrollbar. It is usually clear enough that there is more to see below the fold. Scrollbars used to be sometimes useful to get a sense of how much content there is. But everyone using infinite scroll broke that, not apple.
- inetknght 6y ago
  > on mobile I certainly prefer having a bit more space than a always visible scrollbar. I very much disagree. On all of the mobile devices I've used it has never been clear that scrolling is a thing unless there's a scrollbar. I didn't even know you could "pull down" menus or pull up some app status thing until I called support and asked how to close background apps or turn off wifi
  - vidanay 6y ago
    Modern UI is a seething cauldron of non-intuitiveness and undiscoverability.
    - notriddle 6y ago
      With mobile UI, that's kinda necessary. You don't have a whole lot of space to work with there. It's either really tightly packed touchscreen interfaces, or its horribly overloaded buttons ("when you're in the email app, press the Hang Up button to delete a message"). There is no excuse for it on desktop except blindly imitating mobile UIs.
      - kitsunesoba 6y ago
        > With mobile UI, that's kinda necessary. You don't have a whole lot of space to work with there. It's either really tightly packed touchscreen interfaces, or its horribly overloaded buttons ("when you're in the email app, press the Hang Up button to delete a message"). Or using a PDA-like UI with miniaturized desktop UI elements, but that style requires a stylus to use which is why the simpler, chunkier smartphone touch UIs became popular in the first place.
hieu229 6y ago
I remember working on a panel, allows users to choose an element. Without visible scrollbar, it'd sometimes look like there is no more items. I think it is important to signal there is more content. And how much more to the end of the page
- ar_turnbull 6y ago
  Designers call this a "false bottom" and try to make sure it doesn't happen, but it can be a near impossible task to make sure there's never one given variation in screen sizes / orientations. Often you see websites with hero areas and panels that fill the full screen on standard desktop sizes, but attentive teams will make sure something is cut off so that the page looks unfinished and people scroll. For what it's worth, I've also seen data that Apple users are more likely to scroll by default simply because they've made the scrolling experience so pleasant.
  - hieu229 6y ago
    Interesting. Would you suggest to have the scrollbar visible?
    - notriddle 6y ago
      Doesn't help. Even huge Windows 95 scrollbars will reside in the users' peripheral field of vision, so they won't notice it and won't look at it.
  - trefoiled 6y ago
    Or maybe they're scrolling by default because they're used to not knowing whether or not content is scrollable?
    - ar_turnbull 6y ago
      Yup, that's possible too. Probably a bit of both TBH. Though again, from user testing sessions I've observed, I'd say that "not knowing whether or not content is scrollable" can be a universal problem, not limited just to Mac users.
BitwiseFool 6y ago
One of Apple's core design philosophies is that when something is not in active use it should be hidden from view. Through this perspective it makes sense that they would hide scrollbars when the user isn't doing any scrolling. That being said, I would rather have it always be visible because I'm not that much of a minimalist and I still think that non active information has value at a glance. Edit: This doesn't mean Apple tries to hide everything that isn't in active use. It's a design convention, not a law.
- wk_end 6y ago
  I wonder how long it'll be before the iconic global menu bar is gone from macOS when not in use?
  - inetknght 6y ago
    Browsers on mobile devices already do this and it's infuriating
    - whichdan 6y ago
      Having to scroll to get any controls to appear is such a mediocre UX
      - adolph 6y ago
        I just tap the address part of the top bar and it appears. This is different from a top of screen tap which scrolls to the top.
        whichdan 6y ago
        huh, I never realized tapping the address was separate from tapping the top of the screen
        inetknght 6y ago
        > I just tap the address part of the top bar and it appears Yet another unintuitive undiscovered feature because Apple decided to change 20 years of best practices
simonw 6y ago
Some more context on this: the actual problem I'm trying to solve here is displaying "wide" tables in Datasette - for example this one: https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plants/global-power-plants https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plan... I want the table to scroll horizontally so that the map can stay visible. The two complaints I've had from users about this are: 1. They didn't realize it could be scrolled, so they missed out on the extra columns. I'm probably going to fix this using some kind of visual indication - maybe a shadow. 2. Mouse users have to scroll to the very bottom of the page in order to find the horizontal scrollbar. I'm looking at adding a duplicate scrollbar at the top of the table using the trick implemented by https://github.com/avianey/jqDoubleScroll/blob/master/jquery.doubleScroll.js https://github.com/avianey/jqDoubleScroll/blob/master/jquery... (re-implemented not to depend on jQuery) It's really frustrating how tricky this is.
- ar_turnbull 6y ago
  If you can, try to cut off the content as the visual indication at the edge of the page. You might try bumping up the contrast of the headings as well so that the cutoff is more obvious. Not quite as complex a dataset, but the NHL + MLB have done a reasonable job of making their various stats & standings tables responsive: https://www.nhl.com/standings/2020/division https://www.nhl.com/standings/2020/division
- j-pb 6y ago
  Sorry but horizontal scrolling is just abhorrent UX for everything but maps, and I'd argue that that interaction is not actually perceived as scrolling by the user. I'm glad that it hidden scroll bars make that more inconvenient, feels like a win win situation to me. As for your datasette use case: Why not have explicit buttons to move between colums at a time, or the ability to toggle and reorder individual columns, so that they become more wieldable, or both.
  - rhn_mk1 6y ago
    > horizontal scrolling is just abhorrent UX for everything but maps Why? It seems to get the job done in spreadsheets.
el_don_almighty 6y ago
give back my scroll bars just like my 'esc' key!!!
rootusrootus 6y ago
On my iPhone, not only do I have invisible scrollbars, but when they do show up, it's in the middle of the screen. And not always exactly at the same spot. Someone said it's a bug, and goes away if you don't use 'reduce motion' under accessibility settings. But it's been around for several versions of iOS, so I don't know that it's a priority to fix.
- llarsson 6y ago
  Plus, is not "reduce motion" a very common setting to get away from useless animations? I recall using that setting to make the whole iPhone feel snappier.
robin_reala 6y ago
Obviously if you’re trying to solve this for your consuming users then we’re down to website hacks. But if you just want scrollbars on macOS for your own use, that’s trivial. System Preferences / General / Show scroll bars / Always.
heavyset_go 6y ago
They're also an accessibility nightmare.
- my123 6y ago
  It can be disabled freely by the user in System Preferences -> General on macOS.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dilap 6y ago
Well, while we're griping... I don't mind disappearing scrollbars, but Gmail on iOS takes it even further, and completely eliminates the scrollbar! This is indeed rather annoying. And even worse, amazingly annoyingly, long-ish emails are not downloaded in their entierty by default! So you get part way through the email, and then have to tap "view entire email" to get the rest. And extra super annoying, the rest is not cached, so if you're without internet, too bad for you -- you don't get to read the entire message.
- tokamak-teapot 6y ago
  I recommend Spark as mail client on iOS. It doesn’t do anything crazy with its UI so I find it easy to use.
  - dilap 6y ago
    Thanks! I'll give it a try. So far, I've always ended up coming back to Gmail for one reason or another -- while there are lots of little UI annoyances, it always gets the fundamentals right, which is better than my experience w/ 3rd party clients so far. Fingers crossed for this one. :-)
    - jacurtis 6y ago
      I also tried various 3rd party clients and would always end up going back to gmail's app. My dad kept recommending Spark to me and I just didn't have the energy to try another 3rd party app. I eventually gave in and tried Spark and I haven't gone back to Gmail since. That was about 18 months ago.
whalesalad 6y ago
I love it. I just dislike how when I plug in an old-school mouse to my Mac an old-school scrollbar returns. The scrollbar only needs to be visible during a scroll event.
- ncw96 6y ago
  Go to System Preferences -> General and change “Show scroll bars” to “When scrolling” to get the behavior you want.
smaccona 6y ago
On macOS, I have scrollbars always show. The setting is in System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars -> "Always". On iOS, I definitely prefer no scrollbars, but I don't think there's a way to always display them.
josho 6y ago
Visible scrollbars are unnecessary with proper design. Eg. Reading the Twitter thread I intuitively know that I can scroll to see more because the last line of text is partially cut off by the edge of the screen. This signals to my brain that there is more, and I can scroll. Whereas as I type in this text box as I reply the box is sized perfectly to 6 lines of text and I don’t have the same visual accordance informing me that content exists outside the viewport.
- jpalomaki 6y ago
  Scrollbar also tells how much hidden content there is.
  - xtracto 6y ago
    Exactly, I find it funny how now I have to download additional 1MB of Javascript for a webpage to show me the place in the document I am at the moment.
- lucasmullens 6y ago
  It's a lot of work to get the elements on the page to always space themselves such that one element is cut off. I think it's pretty impressive if a site bothers with that, but it's hard to call that "proper design".
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  This is only true if your particular mix of vertical resolution, aspect ratio, zoom, and content visibly show a cut off element. Invisible scrollbars should not be the default.
SloopJon 6y ago
I don't like the hidden scroll bars either, so I've set "Show scroll bars" to "Always". If I understand correctly, Simon wants his web site to display a scroll bar on a system that isn't so configured. I'm not sure why--does it mess with the viewport width or something? Edit: simonw just posted more information on this thread.
tacker2000 6y ago
On mobile it makes sense, since the user has much more direct control over the scrollable area and the area is quite small. The thing is, apple has been trying to converge the desktop and mobile UI into one single interface, and this is a prime example where this approach fails. A visible scrollbar is extremely important to the desktop user, but not really so to the mobile one.
masswerk 6y ago
To be honest, nobody needs text unless they read it. Moreover, all these different typefaces, sizes and tints are a serious threat to any corporate UI identity and professional UX. Especially, as texts from various sources are fighting for the display and user attention. Let's get rid of visible text, unless you hover or swipe on it! Much cleaner UIs and smooth UX are guaranteed, which is exactly what customers want! (Disclaimer: this is obviously in the sarcasm category, but is still meant to provide viable food for a thought experiment.)
SavantIdiot 6y ago
> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this I did.
throwaway4good 6y ago
They are converging their desktop ui towards their mobile ui. The scrollbar is learned functionality; if users know it, they know what to do. If you haven't seen it before, then it is not obvious and it is not an obvious way to interact compared to a scroll gesture on trackpad or a touch screen. Apple can see that more user will be coming that are used to mobile os'es than users experienced in classic desktop ui's. Apple is correct in hiding the scrollbar.
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > Apple can see that more user will be coming that are used to mobile os'es than users experienced in classic desktop ui's. Modeling a desktop UI off of a mobile UI is just as dumb as modeling a mobile UI off a desktop UI. Each platform has totally different constraints and strengths, shoehorning one into the other will always be a failure.
makecheck 6y ago
Also part of a trend to add more “hover and wait” elements pointlessly: - Can’t see scrollbar without hovering and waiting. - Can’t see folder drag icon in window title without hovering and waiting. - Can’t interact with notifications without hovering and waiting. - Can’t see full menu of options on Full Screen window button without hovering and waiting. Dear Apple: this is a fundamentally backwards design trend that creates major productivity hits. These were arbitrary changes that made things harder to use. In short: there was no “design” happening here, it was just “fiddling”.
- efwfwef 6y ago
  Oh my... these macos notifications are driving me crazy, you can't just go and close them. I think we should create some rules: - if there's an animation/wait time to get to a UI, it's crap - if users have to be fast to get to a UI, it's crap
- Toutouxc 6y ago
  > Can’t see full menu of options on Full Screen window button without hovering and waiting. So it's not just me! Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think this is used anywhere else in macOS. It's obviously a button and it opens a normal vanilla macOS list-menu (don't know the term they use) without you clicking it. The hidden folder icon for dragging is a bit annoying, but this infuriates me for some reason. I liked the Mavericks fullscreen button the most, but even the click-and-hold solution was better than this crap.
- userbinator 6y ago
  The worst part is when some app implements that poorly, so you end up with a scrollbar that disappears while you're still hovered, causing your click to fall through and hit something you didn't want.
  - ectopod 6y ago
    Or you're trying to select text from the last line of a text file but the horizontal scrollbar keeps popping up and getting in the way. This absurdity happens in the default text editor in Mint Cinnamon.
Klonoar 6y ago
A weird but possibly relevant question: is this more of a factor for mouse users on macOS? e.g, I use a magic trackpad... it feels very natural to swipe on anything and expect it to move a little (or a lot). You lose this interaction with a mouse, or it's not as simple to do. I actually very much dislike scrollbars after being trackpad only for some years.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Worst thing about this, for me is at least 5 times a year since this started I have to go back to our engineers and tell them that users can't tell whats scrollable because on windows all the scrollbars are hidden, or appearing in weird places where they shouldn't because the dev team who only tests in Chrome on Mac can't see any scrollbars anyway.
ryandrake 6y ago
Visible scrollbars should be a user preference. If you're on macOS, it's easy to set: System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars. Done. Set it once and move on with your life. If you're a web site, you need to respect the user's preference. Don't play tricks trying to jam a visible scroll bar onto your site if the user has it off in their preferences. Also please don't try to use tricks to hide a scroll bar if the user has it on in preferences. Can't these web sites just focus on their content and not always be worrying about what magical 50 lines of JavaScript they can use to override the user all the time? Maybe I like to browse in a really long 4096 x 256 pixel window, and use a pink background color and Comic Sans font. Deal with it!
- jackson1442 6y ago
  Websites that mess with my scrollbar preference always break scrolling since they implement their own version of scrolling for no discernible reason.
tengbretson 6y ago
I think it's pretty clear at this point that OS X is meant to be interacted with using a trackpad, and that anything else is getting a second-class experience.
- smoldesu 6y ago
  +1 for this. One of the most frustrating parts of MacOS is how miserable it is to use it with a mouse. Turning off mouse acceleration needs to get a settings menu entry, stat.
- disposekinetics 6y ago
  As someone with a hatred for touch based controls this frustrates me, but I think you're wholly correct.
kmfrk 6y ago
One thing I agree on wrt removing scroll bars is that scroll bars make a lot less sense now for articles, because you'll think you're 20% through an article, only for it to turn out that 60% of the article is ads and other crap. In that sense, it feels as if they've lost some of their meaning. For articles, it might be interesting to do something to inform the user that not all content is alike, possibly through metadata.
jedberg 6y ago
After I learned of this issue a while back, I activated always on scrollbars on my Mac. It's amazing how many websites are clearly designed only by people on Macs, who don't realize all the extra scrollbars they have.
jbj 6y ago
my big issue with invisible scrollbars are particularly when they dont appear in small boxes and I dont realize I am passing a scrollable area
thih9 6y ago
This seems easy to solve; at least on MacOS: "System Preferences" -> "Show scroll bars" -> "Always". Update: Ah, I now realise that the goal is to make sure that an app always displays scroll bars. I hope that's impossible; personally I don't mind either scrollbar setting but I do want consistency and I do want apps that respect my OS settings.
taylodl 6y ago
I haven't thought about scroll bars in years! I just use the two finger gesture on my trackpad to scroll. In System Preferences/General you can select Always for 'Show scroll bars' if you so desire. At least Mojave provides that option.
kemonocode 6y ago
I feel like designers at Apple at large with others following in tow to emulate them have been waging a silent war against the scroll bar for a while now. Making it less and less visible until it ultimately disappears sounds reasonable when infinite scrolling (and heavens forbid, scroll hijacking) has rendered it far less useful.
gherkinnn 6y ago
> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this Speak for yourself. I love it. And it works like a charm with magic-y input devices like screens and touch pads. It’s a bit shit with discreetly scrolling mechanisms and on OS’ that don’t do it right.
comprev 6y ago
First thing I do on a new mac account is enable "always on" scrollbars. They give me visual clue as to how much of the information I am reading - am I 10% down the page or 80%?
intrasight 6y ago
The issue with MacOS is a lack of user choice. One reason that I gave it up 20 years back.
- sbuk 6y ago
  This changed is Mac OS X 10 years ago. You've literally been able to configure this behaviour in system Preferences ever since.
  - intrasight 6y ago
    That's good to know. With the arrival of Apple silicon, I am tempted to try again. Will probably wait for M2.
mschuster91 6y ago
It's not just Apple. Android is the same - good luck "catching" the scrollbar to read a long document in Chrome.
VectorLock 6y ago
I think the scroll bar getting smaller is a by-product of it being less prevalent as a usable control since swipe and multi touch scrolling is the fashion now.
timvdalen 6y ago
Is this the correct link? The text appears in this thread, which has much more context: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1369705219110498304 https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1369705219110498304
passivate 6y ago
Can someone explain how this works? For e.g. Can an app choose to have always-visible scrollbars?
naikrovek 6y ago
I really think that Windows 2000-era Windows Forms had the user experience nailed perfectly. It wasn't the prettiest UI paradigm ever, but it was the most functional and easiest to teach. Nothing was omitted, and the user was shown everything they needed to see in order to get a complete idea of the state of the application. I don't think that efforts to hide UI elements that aren't in use is going to prove to be a good idea when we look back at today from the future. Here's a good rule, in my mind: Don't hide UI elements from the user. End of rule. I do not care if it looks better without whatever UI element. The toolbox in my garage would look better if I could only see the tools I needed at the time I need them, and I would return that toolbox (or never buy it in the first place) because it is constantly lying to me about the state of the toolbox, which is absolutely insulting position for a toolbox designer to adopt.
- karaterobot 6y ago
  I agree with a lot of what you say, but let's take a step back and acknowledge that, on the whole, desktop and mobile UI design has improved a lot in the last 20 years. Interfaces are generally more standardized than they were back then. The type and layout hierarchies are clearer. There are better patterns (and better technologies) both for orienting and getting help when you're lost. There's better feedback from the UI when there's an error or a state change. And that's not even getting into accessibility improvements. It's definitely not better across the board, and the MacOS scrollbars are a good example of that. But, on the whole, it's a lot better than it was, and I wouldn't want to go back and unlearn all the things we've learned in the last 20 years.
  - MagnumOpus 6y ago
    Mobile I give you -- of course that is obvious, it would be hard to get worse UI on a 1080p OLED screen that we had on a 50x100 pixel monochrome display. Desktop, no way. Windows 2000/Office 2002 usability by beginners was head and shoulder above today's versions, even at 10x less dev effort and 100x less HD/RAM/CPU usage (yes the functionality was lesser, but the UI wasn't). And add to that the counterfactual of 200,000 man years of development within sane UI paradigms that don't live under the pretense that every Windows PC is a touchscreen tablet, and you could have so much more!
lucasmullens 6y ago
You can use ::-webkit-scrollbar and ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb to force the scrollbar to be visible. It seems to be the easiest way to make sure the user knows a div is scrollable, even if it is fairly hacky.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wait_a_minute 6y ago
Does anyone really want to see scrollbars even when we’ll be able to scroll with our eyes and even mind?
- tbihl 6y ago
  Yes. The scroll bar is primarily for showing progress.
  - wait_a_minute 6y ago
    good argument, I accept it.
samatman 6y ago
> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this as opposed to some design lead at Apple pushing a weird personal preference for tidyness on their entire user base I strongly prefer the invisible scroll bars in about 95% of cases. I'm either using a trackpad or a scroll wheel on my trackball. In the former case, it's trivially easy to jog the screen up and down or sideways, to see if there's missing content. In the latter case, yeah, horizontal scrolling is challenging, but I'm going to be on a widescreen monitor, so my response is to fill more of the window with the content (quick shout-out to Moom, which makes this easy). It very occasionally happens that I won't notice that there's more content available, and scroll bars would help with that. But I'd rather optimize for the usual case, and get the cleaner lines and extra real estate which go with it.
- efwfwef 6y ago
  Good luck scrolling to the bottom of a very long page. And then going back up.
  - smnscu 6y ago
    You can always click on the scroll bars -- invisible doesn't mean they don't exist, they simply go out of the way when they're not needed (i.e. most of the time / when not scrolling). You can do that on iOS and Android as well, tap and hold on the scroll bar to quickly scroll through an entire document.
    - efwfwef 6y ago
      I just tried that on Chrome on macOS and it doesn't work
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    How exactly is that an issue?
  - Toutouxc 6y ago
    This is actually a non-issue (or at least a minor issue for extremely long pages) on a Mac, because macOS has system-wide kinetic scrolling and all Apple input devices use touch sensitive surfaces for scrolling. Not saying you're wrong, it's certainly annoying on mobile devices (compounded by the narrow screens and responsive content).
efwfwef 6y ago
I really hate it too, I don't understand why they do this... Even using Chrome on mac I can't scroll properly if I'm not fast enough to catch the scrollbar after a light scroll.
- nikisweeting 6y ago
  Why not just set "Always show scrollbars" in System Preferences if you don't like it that way?
  - efwfwef 6y ago
    MVP!
disposekinetics 6y ago
I think another part of this problem is that websites are aloud to change scroll bar colors via CSS. The scrollbar is a UI element, not a part of the page and it adds to the problem.
squarefoot 6y ago
Not just Apple. Windows 8 and beyond horrors aside, I have this friend of mine to whom I already installed three Linux machines in the past (1 x XFCE and 2 x Mate) who was 100% satisfied with them. Having brought a new faster laptop for reinstall, I wanted to give him something prettier which wouldn't slow down. Turned out he came back frustrated because of the asinine way KDE Plasma desktop menus behave, literally hiding things from view based on mouse position and not following a click, which is against every rule of good UI programming. Please stop following bad designs just because they're new and/or come from big names; Windows XP UX still beats everything out there both in usability and intuitiveness. If users have to read a manual even to do the most basic things with a new user interface, I call it a failure.
- quacked 6y ago
  When I was 8-10, I absolutely sailed through new programs in Windows XP. Now that I'm 25, every new thing I want to do in a "new" app (Discord, Slack, Facebook, Zoom, etc.) is precluded by "Google, how do I..." There's so little conceptual integrity in modern applications. I can't stand it.
  - jacurtis 6y ago
    Since you mentioned Discord and Slack together here, I have to point out that one of the worst design choices a company can make is hide CRITICAL interaction elements behind a hover state. Slack and Discord are both incredibly guilty of this. Lots of important things that you do everyday is only visible to the user if they are hovering over a certain element on the page. For some of us this isn't as big of a deal. For me, I tend to move my mouse around as I investigate a UI and try to figure out how to do something. But when I watch my mom interact with a website, she works entirely differently. For example if she wanted to edit a message, she wouldn't naturally hover over the message and see the gray pencil appear on the far right of the message in a light gray bubble, and then think to click on the pencil. She is looking for something that says "edit". And she will stop, lean back, take her hand off the mouse, and start looking around with her eyes to the various parts of the app. She will NEVER find the edit button. Even if she is hovering she would probably see the pencil and not have it register that the light gray pencil means, "edit". Furthermore, neither of these apps like to use "buttons". So when you do various things like editing a message or writing a room description, and stuff like this, they just assume you will press the ENTER key. There is no button to save or submit. In discord, light gray text shows up on the bottom that says "Press ENTER to save", but many people won't notice that. Zoom is equally guilty, but not as bad. Zoom seems a little more logical in most places and they tend to use brighter colors on buttons and messages as opposed to Slack and Discord that want to use 50 shades of gray (and not in the sexy way) as the color palette throughout their app. Although I will admit, about once a week I forget how to leave a Zoom call. Zoom makes it far too complicated to do something that every Zoom user will do on every Zoom call, which is inevitably leave the room.
vmception 6y ago
Articles and papers should have dates and an indication of how long it is
shaggyfrog 6y ago
This has always drove me bananas, too. I still have 10.14 but `defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowScrollBars -string "Always"` has worked for me for years now. Does it work in 10.15?
GeekyBear 6y ago
Even a bargain bin mouse has a scroll wheel these days, track pads use a two finger gesture to scroll. If those options don't work for you, change the system preferences back to always showing the scroll bar.
foobarbecue 6y ago
I recently noticed that the Facebook android app never has scrollbars when you're reading a post (not in an infinite-scrolling situation), and I haven't found a way to make them appear.
opk 6y ago
Scrollbars are terrible UI. You have to drag them in the opposite direction to the way the way you want things to move. How far you need to drag the bar to move a certain distance is dependent on the length of the whole document. In general, I think many mistakes were made on early GUIs that simply became entrenched and it is now hard for people to imagine them being any different. I long ago disabled scroll bars in my terminal and text editor and I never miss them.
- Rapzid 6y ago
  > You have to drag them in the opposite direction to the way the way you want things to move In my mind I'm just moving the viewport down. I'm scrolling down the page, not moving the page up.
- aylmao 6y ago
  I usually have them disabled too, yeah. I think with modern cursor devices they become redundant— you don't need a UI element to move around the document with the mouse/trackpad, because the mouse/trackpad usually has built-in scrolling with a wheel or gesture. I can see how in the past they were a necessary element though.
  - jonny_eh 6y ago
    They're useful for at least knowing what IS scrollable and how much more distance there is left to scroll.
- pnt12 6y ago
  Drag down to see the content below, up to see above. Total scroll height is 100% of the page and the bar will have an height equivalent to the portion of page you're seeing, allowing to predict from a simple glance how long a page is. I'd say it's quite beautiful in its functional simplicity.
c-smile 6y ago
I'd like us to look on this from different angle: Layout of visible scrollbars, to be precise scrollbars that take space off scrollable, may oscillate - not always has a determined solution in case of `overflow:auto;`, steps: 1. You start layout width without any scrollbars to determine height of the content; 2. If content height exceeds height of the scrollable you will need to show v-scrollbar, and so goto #1; 3. While reducing available width at #2 you may have content width overflow width of scrollable container minus v-scrollbar, so you need to show h-scrollbar that reduces available height, and so goto #2; There are conditions at particular content/container sizes and layout algorithms when the solution oscillates. So `overflow:auto;` (show scrollbars only when needed) is a) quite expensive (layout happens multiple times) and b) not that easy to implement. Floating scrollbars that appear on top of scrollable content and so do not take screen space are technically better.
Koshkin 6y ago
The Gnome desktop has done something (similar?) to the scrollbars (and I hate it).
runjake 6y ago
You can change this behavior in System Preferences -> General-> Show scroll bars -> Always This isn't some snarky comment. 1. A lot of people don't know about this setting. 2. When you set it to "Always", telemetry gets sent to Apple. If enough people do this, they may consider changing the default behavior.
- kasabali 6y ago
  Telemetry data is used for justifying decisions, not making them.
  - runjake 6y ago
    This is painfully true. You must've worked there.
littlecranky67 6y ago
On macOS as well iOS and AFAIK also Android, there is a rubber band/bouncy effect when you scroll to the bottom and reached the end. So you DO get a visual indicator when you are at the end. When you scrolled down and didn't get that "bounce" you know there is more to scroll to. Additionally, the scroll bar will show during scroll and indicate your position in the page. Not saying this is good UX or in any way intuitive, just pointing it out. I think its a matter of taste and long-learned habits. Similar to "natural scroll" that is now the default for macOS. Being >20years a computer user, natural scroll felt just wrong to me, I always switched it back and thought Apple was just plain stupid. This changed when I introduced my father, who had long gotten away with not using computers, to a PC. When I showed him that he can use two-finger scroll on his laptop's trackpad on a website to get down, he said "oh, but its the wrong way!". I was puzzled, and he insisted and told me that its just the wrong way, reaching out to a piece of paper showing me that the content at the bottom would move UP into his view, if he puts 2 finger on the paper and moves them up, too. That was when I realized that "natural scrolling" is actual the physical way of doing it, and my hatred against it was just based that I was used to it in 20+ years of computers being the other way around. It is also the same with Y-Axis in computer games, basically the default setting of the first computer game you ever played determines how you set your controllers (non-) inverted Y-Axis for life :)
deleted 6y ago
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fogof 6y ago
This is especially a problem for me, since I use an extension to make my websites dark. To fix this, I recently downloaded the Rescroller Chrome extension. Not only are my scroll bars now visible, they are a fun lime green (users pick color)! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rescroller/ddehdnnhjimbggeeenghijehnpakijod?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rescroller/ddehdnn...
mdoms 6y ago
I really don't understand it - they refuse to implement a touch screen on their laptops but continue to design for touch interactions.
blackrock 6y ago
I’ve often made mistakes from not seeing extra data, because the data required you to scroll down to see it. It’s a really infuriating situation. And quite a terrible UI design. And by hiding the side scroll bars, it removes your ability to quickly page jump down to the bottom of the page, or to anywhere else on the page, from clicking on the white space of the scroll bars.
swiley 6y ago
It's in the default gnome theme too and changing themes on gnome is kind of a bitch if you're not actually using it as a DE (plus the devs hate it.) Now I have to run some kind of theming daemon (WTF?) just so I can have scroll bars. Sometimes it eats escape keys and launches random crap (occasionally an entire DE) just to throw a full screen modal dialog box telling me that escape isn't mapped to any shortcuts. Defaults should be sane, not fashionable and many people still expect and even need scrollbars.
gowld 6y ago
My Mac shows scrollbars, because I toggled the preference setting.
not2b 6y ago
It isn't just Apple, I'm seeing an increasing number of web sites where the scroll bars disappear, and only re-appear if you click or maybe hover in just the right place. A couple of times I've wasted time not knowing that there was more content the next screen down, or that I needed to scroll some iframe or other object to reveal additional content. Apparently designers have decided that scroll bars are ugly and should disappear when possible, and they get "when possible" wrong sometimes.
sandos 6y ago
Hidden scrollbars are cancer. Me, as a developer, using computers pretty much at least 8 hours per day still struggle with finding that god-damn scrollbar several times per week! What about all the ones with even less know-how, or less patience?
wyuenho 6y ago
The Mac's hidden scroll bar is normally quite usable in Safari and Firefox, when you move the cursor to the side and start scrolling, it'll automatically pop up, with a thick bar that you can hold on to with the pointing device. That is, unless you are trying to figure out the exact behavior on Chrome or some Electron app, which is half the most used desktop apps on the macOS these days, and took you a while to figure it's actually a bug in Chrome. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=678537 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=678537
stjohnswarts 6y ago
One of the first things I do is make scroll bars always on. I wish it was opt out rather than opt in but I never lost my mind over it.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
I personally prefer auto-hiding scrollbars for my own general use. But I was recently in the same position as OP trying to make horizontally scrollable sections more discoverable and it’s really a pain. OP is using JS so there’s a lot of options, but my use case was CSS-only and I ended up giving up on the scrollbar visibility and using a “scroll shadow” instead—where overflowing content displays a small shadow over the content which fades out at the end of the scroll. It’s not as clear as an explicit scrollbar but it’s a fairly common pattern users do often recognize.
godshatter 6y ago
On the topic of scrollbars and UX, I like it when a program shows a mockup of the rest of the window in the scrollbar area. For example, Kate from KDE does this. It's helpful not just to know where you are, but to see the basic structure of the document that's left to view.
therealdrag0 6y ago
I've been using the "rescroller" plugin in Chrome for years now. Nice to force a fixed solid grey scroll bar.
BluSyn 6y ago
I hate to say it; this entire thread is perfect case study of why engineers should never be put in charge of UI design. This is how you end up with a UX like AWS.
WalterBright 6y ago
I've noticed another trend towards very narrow scroll bars and a dot-like tab. They're annoyingly difficult to grab and move. Then there are the web pages which simply will not scroll smoothly, because scrolling changes the content of the page. It's really irritating. Harumph.
manicdee 6y ago
It gets worse: 1. Plug a monitor and external mouse into your MBA. 2. Now close the lid. 3. Open Safari, navigate to Tesla.com. 4. Open the hamburger menu, click the country down the bottom. 5. Try scrolling the "Select Your Region" content to pick United Kingdom. If you use the mouse wheel, the div doesn't scroll. You can click-and-drag to highlight text and as you drag past the bottom of the div it will scroll. Now open the lid of the MBA and the div can be scrolled using two finger gesture on the trackpad.
kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 6y ago
Why is this a problem? Scrollbars are unnecessary and ugly
Hammershaft 6y ago
I have a pet theory that as design is oriented around the conventions and abilities that users bring to the product, designers are couched in cultures and locations where users are highly tech literate. This anchors designers expectations of the average user towards the high end, and allows designers to justify stripping away ui hints in favor of aesthetics.
CoconutPilot 6y ago
"If you can't make it good, at least make it look good." I guess Apple has conceded! https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_gates_382270 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_gates_382270
bradgessler 6y ago
I’ll say it: I prefer it this way.
t0r0nat0r 6y ago
Lol people here need to chill. I like apple’s UX and i think the point here is a uniform experience across platforms. That being said, I think it works perfectly fine like it is now IMO.
LoveMortuus 6y ago
I believe that design should be done in such a way that no matter your background you can still use the tool without having to spend more time learning then actually using the tool.

590 points by edward 6y ago

The mistake Apple made was that they should have made them candy coated.

An interesting output of this is, if you keep scrollbars visible, you'll find that a lot of websites end up with weird extra scrollbars on random elements. What often causes this is some HTML element overflowing by one pixel, but no one saw it during the QA process because all the webdevs were using Macs, which have invisible scrollbars by default. I always enable visible scrollbars on my dev computers specifically so I can catch problems like this.

erwinh 6y ago
mac user & web dev here, I often employ a trick where I wrap my scrolling div in another div which has overflow hidden just to hide the scrollbar. QA & usability engineers must hate me :p
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > QA & usability engineers must hate me :p "Hate" is a strong work, but humble users like myself also dislike you (or rather, your choices).
- distalx 6y ago
  How? can you please share some example?
- ShroudedNight 6y ago
  This comes across as smugly prideful at being explicitly user-hostile. What's the upside here?
- deft 6y ago
  Why? Stop making bad software and laughing about how it screws people over.
trinovantes 6y ago
I've seen so many broken web components do this: 1. Hover over an element that enables the visibility of something else 2. Trigger an overflow and cause scrollbar to show up 3. Scrollbar shifts the original element 4. Original element is no longer being hovered so new element gets hidden 5. Scrollbar disappears and original element moves back 6. Repeat
- squaresmile 6y ago
  Hah if your Github repo name is at the right length, you'll get that bug with the fork pop-up window. [0] https://i.imgur.com/dS5acnx.gifv https://i.imgur.com/dS5acnx.gifv The gif doesn't have enough fps. IRL the animation is about 10x faster than that so there's no time to click the username. Reported it but the support agent couldn't reproduce ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
scabbycakes 6y ago
I call it Made-By-A-Macitis because it's so common in this industry since MBP's are issued by default almost in web dev companies, which inevitably leads to weird scrollbars here and there on their startup websites until someone else finally reports it or a dev finally breaks down and tests it on any other non-Apple device.
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  Remember all the "Made for / Works Best in Internet Explorer" buttons from the early 90s/early 00s? We've gone through a long period of "Works on my Safari".
- markogresak 6y ago
  > dev finally breaks down and tests it on any other non-Apple device Why the need for an extra device? There's a setting in the System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: "Always". Or it will automatically show scroll bars if you're using a mouse. If you're a web developer and your target audience is not limited to only macOS and mobile, you should have the Show scroll bars set to Always. I'm using a mbp for most of my web dev career and I've always caught these bugs during development. What I do agree is that Windows or Linux makes this setting a default, which makes it more obvious. While testing on different devices is always better, it's not necessary to catch these trivial problems.
preommr 6y ago
> * { overflow: hidden } defeated dev noises
- brockwhittaker 6y ago
  but actually this is the worst possible solution to this and causes tons of issues.
jacurtis 6y ago
I honestly think that this is the main reason that Apple hides scrollbars by default. I have turned on "always visible" scrollbars before and it really does ruin the internet experience. Now I'm not sure if you blame the OS maker (Apple/Microsoft), the browser makers (Apple again, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla), or the web developers of the websites. But regardless of who accepts or deserves the blame, it is hard to dispute that the experience is far worse with scrollbars forced always on. It shouldn't be this way, but as of right now, it ruins the experience. Like you mentioned, some websites simply don't work or don't work how they should. You end up with scrollbars on elements that aren't even form fields because of weird hacks that web developers are doing with overflow elements or strange CSS anomalies. I'm not sure how you address this issue. But it is definitely more deeply seeded than the OS level, and I think web developers (a lot of us here) should take some of the responsibility for ruining scrollbars. It is our company's apps and sites that drove Apple to this decision. I suspect that one of the reasons for hidden scrollbars by default is because the teams at Apple have tried to use the web with "always-on" scrollbars and didn't want their users experiencing the web that way. Remember also that defaults are important. Most people will never change the setting, even if it was obnoxious. Most Mac users are going to use the default setting, regardless of whether the default is always on, always off, or auto. Whatever the default is, that will be how most people use the computer and just accept it as "how it works". So Apple has to choose the best option (between three bad choices) that will best best for MOST people. Not everyone, but MOST. I also think that MOST people are used to automatic scroll bars at this point. Again, my Mom is the person that will never change a setting. So she will always use whatever the default is. And she is used to automatic scrollbars. She knows that if she wants to see the scrollbars, she has to do a micro-flick of the scrollwheel (or her finger on mobile/touch) to reveal the scrollbar. It requires minimal-to-no effort and most people have grown accustomed to it now. Is it flawless? No. But I do think it is the best option MOST of the time.
- jakub_g 6y ago
  > I have turned on "always visible" scrollbars before and it really does ruin the internet experience. You have scrollbars everywhere precisely because they're hidden from developers who don't even know about them, and it seems ~all developers use Macs for web dev those days.
apocalyptic0n3 6y ago
> no one saw it during the QA process because all the webdevs were using Macs, which have invisible scrollbars by default. We've had this happen numerous times in the past. As a result, I had to make it mandatory that devs on my team and the QA team have scrollbars always on on their Macs. They get frustrated that I require it but it catches so many minor layout issues that it's worth it.

mrtranscendence 6y ago

This is annoying in macOS, but I do prefer having no scrollbars in iOS. There's limited screen real estate, and messing with a scrollbar with my finger doesn't feel any better than just scrolling to where I want to be.

_Microft 6y ago
Learning never stops! I did not not know that you could actually use iOS scrollbars as real scrollbars. They are extremely fiddly indeed but I am pretty sure I am going to use them from time to time. I always thought they were simply a sort of dumb progress bar.

smoe 6y ago

> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this as opposed to some design lead at Apple pushing a weird personal preference for tidyness on their entire user base Maybe I don't understand completely what he is referring to, but on mobile I certainly prefer having a bit more space than a always visible scrollbar. It is usually clear enough that there is more to see below the fold. Scrollbars used to be sometimes useful to get a sense of how much content there is. But everyone using infinite scroll broke that, not apple.

inetknght 6y ago
> on mobile I certainly prefer having a bit more space than a always visible scrollbar. I very much disagree. On all of the mobile devices I've used it has never been clear that scrolling is a thing unless there's a scrollbar. I didn't even know you could "pull down" menus or pull up some app status thing until I called support and asked how to close background apps or turn off wifi
- vidanay 6y ago
  Modern UI is a seething cauldron of non-intuitiveness and undiscoverability.
  - notriddle 6y ago
    With mobile UI, that's kinda necessary. You don't have a whole lot of space to work with there. It's either really tightly packed touchscreen interfaces, or its horribly overloaded buttons ("when you're in the email app, press the Hang Up button to delete a message"). There is no excuse for it on desktop except blindly imitating mobile UIs.
    - kitsunesoba 6y ago
      > With mobile UI, that's kinda necessary. You don't have a whole lot of space to work with there. It's either really tightly packed touchscreen interfaces, or its horribly overloaded buttons ("when you're in the email app, press the Hang Up button to delete a message"). Or using a PDA-like UI with miniaturized desktop UI elements, but that style requires a stylus to use which is why the simpler, chunkier smartphone touch UIs became popular in the first place.

hieu229 6y ago

I remember working on a panel, allows users to choose an element. Without visible scrollbar, it'd sometimes look like there is no more items. I think it is important to signal there is more content. And how much more to the end of the page

ar_turnbull 6y ago
Designers call this a "false bottom" and try to make sure it doesn't happen, but it can be a near impossible task to make sure there's never one given variation in screen sizes / orientations. Often you see websites with hero areas and panels that fill the full screen on standard desktop sizes, but attentive teams will make sure something is cut off so that the page looks unfinished and people scroll. For what it's worth, I've also seen data that Apple users are more likely to scroll by default simply because they've made the scrolling experience so pleasant.
- hieu229 6y ago
  Interesting. Would you suggest to have the scrollbar visible?
  - notriddle 6y ago
    Doesn't help. Even huge Windows 95 scrollbars will reside in the users' peripheral field of vision, so they won't notice it and won't look at it.
- trefoiled 6y ago
  Or maybe they're scrolling by default because they're used to not knowing whether or not content is scrollable?
  - ar_turnbull 6y ago
    Yup, that's possible too. Probably a bit of both TBH. Though again, from user testing sessions I've observed, I'd say that "not knowing whether or not content is scrollable" can be a universal problem, not limited just to Mac users.

BitwiseFool 6y ago

One of Apple's core design philosophies is that when something is not in active use it should be hidden from view. Through this perspective it makes sense that they would hide scrollbars when the user isn't doing any scrolling. That being said, I would rather have it always be visible because I'm not that much of a minimalist and I still think that non active information has value at a glance. Edit: This doesn't mean Apple tries to hide everything that isn't in active use. It's a design convention, not a law.

wk_end 6y ago
I wonder how long it'll be before the iconic global menu bar is gone from macOS when not in use?
- inetknght 6y ago
  Browsers on mobile devices already do this and it's infuriating
  - whichdan 6y ago
    Having to scroll to get any controls to appear is such a mediocre UX
    - adolph 6y ago
      I just tap the address part of the top bar and it appears. This is different from a top of screen tap which scrolls to the top.
      - whichdan 6y ago
        huh, I never realized tapping the address was separate from tapping the top of the screen
      - inetknght 6y ago
        > I just tap the address part of the top bar and it appears Yet another unintuitive undiscovered feature because Apple decided to change 20 years of best practices

simonw 6y ago

Some more context on this: the actual problem I'm trying to solve here is displaying "wide" tables in Datasette - for example this one: https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plants/global-power-plants https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plan... I want the table to scroll horizontally so that the map can stay visible. The two complaints I've had from users about this are: 1. They didn't realize it could be scrolled, so they missed out on the extra columns. I'm probably going to fix this using some kind of visual indication - maybe a shadow. 2. Mouse users have to scroll to the very bottom of the page in order to find the horizontal scrollbar. I'm looking at adding a duplicate scrollbar at the top of the table using the trick implemented by https://github.com/avianey/jqDoubleScroll/blob/master/jquery.doubleScroll.js https://github.com/avianey/jqDoubleScroll/blob/master/jquery... (re-implemented not to depend on jQuery) It's really frustrating how tricky this is.

ar_turnbull 6y ago
If you can, try to cut off the content as the visual indication at the edge of the page. You might try bumping up the contrast of the headings as well so that the cutoff is more obvious. Not quite as complex a dataset, but the NHL + MLB have done a reasonable job of making their various stats & standings tables responsive: https://www.nhl.com/standings/2020/division https://www.nhl.com/standings/2020/division
j-pb 6y ago
Sorry but horizontal scrolling is just abhorrent UX for everything but maps, and I'd argue that that interaction is not actually perceived as scrolling by the user. I'm glad that it hidden scroll bars make that more inconvenient, feels like a win win situation to me. As for your datasette use case: Why not have explicit buttons to move between colums at a time, or the ability to toggle and reorder individual columns, so that they become more wieldable, or both.
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  > horizontal scrolling is just abhorrent UX for everything but maps Why? It seems to get the job done in spreadsheets.

el_don_almighty 6y ago

give back my scroll bars just like my 'esc' key!!!

rootusrootus 6y ago

On my iPhone, not only do I have invisible scrollbars, but when they do show up, it's in the middle of the screen. And not always exactly at the same spot. Someone said it's a bug, and goes away if you don't use 'reduce motion' under accessibility settings. But it's been around for several versions of iOS, so I don't know that it's a priority to fix.

llarsson 6y ago
Plus, is not "reduce motion" a very common setting to get away from useless animations? I recall using that setting to make the whole iPhone feel snappier.

robin_reala 6y ago

Obviously if you’re trying to solve this for your consuming users then we’re down to website hacks. But if you just want scrollbars on macOS for your own use, that’s trivial. System Preferences / General / Show scroll bars / Always.

heavyset_go 6y ago

They're also an accessibility nightmare.

my123 6y ago
It can be disabled freely by the user in System Preferences -> General on macOS.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dilap 6y ago

Well, while we're griping... I don't mind disappearing scrollbars, but Gmail on iOS takes it even further, and completely eliminates the scrollbar! This is indeed rather annoying. And even worse, amazingly annoyingly, long-ish emails are not downloaded in their entierty by default! So you get part way through the email, and then have to tap "view entire email" to get the rest. And extra super annoying, the rest is not cached, so if you're without internet, too bad for you -- you don't get to read the entire message.

tokamak-teapot 6y ago
I recommend Spark as mail client on iOS. It doesn’t do anything crazy with its UI so I find it easy to use.
- dilap 6y ago
  Thanks! I'll give it a try. So far, I've always ended up coming back to Gmail for one reason or another -- while there are lots of little UI annoyances, it always gets the fundamentals right, which is better than my experience w/ 3rd party clients so far. Fingers crossed for this one. :-)
  - jacurtis 6y ago
    I also tried various 3rd party clients and would always end up going back to gmail's app. My dad kept recommending Spark to me and I just didn't have the energy to try another 3rd party app. I eventually gave in and tried Spark and I haven't gone back to Gmail since. That was about 18 months ago.

whalesalad 6y ago

I love it. I just dislike how when I plug in an old-school mouse to my Mac an old-school scrollbar returns. The scrollbar only needs to be visible during a scroll event.

ncw96 6y ago
Go to System Preferences -> General and change “Show scroll bars” to “When scrolling” to get the behavior you want.

smaccona 6y ago

On macOS, I have scrollbars always show. The setting is in System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars -> "Always". On iOS, I definitely prefer no scrollbars, but I don't think there's a way to always display them.

josho 6y ago

Visible scrollbars are unnecessary with proper design. Eg. Reading the Twitter thread I intuitively know that I can scroll to see more because the last line of text is partially cut off by the edge of the screen. This signals to my brain that there is more, and I can scroll. Whereas as I type in this text box as I reply the box is sized perfectly to 6 lines of text and I don’t have the same visual accordance informing me that content exists outside the viewport.

jpalomaki 6y ago
Scrollbar also tells how much hidden content there is.
- xtracto 6y ago
  Exactly, I find it funny how now I have to download additional 1MB of Javascript for a webpage to show me the place in the document I am at the moment.
lucasmullens 6y ago
It's a lot of work to get the elements on the page to always space themselves such that one element is cut off. I think it's pretty impressive if a site bothers with that, but it's hard to call that "proper design".
Hammershaft 6y ago
This is only true if your particular mix of vertical resolution, aspect ratio, zoom, and content visibly show a cut off element. Invisible scrollbars should not be the default.

SloopJon 6y ago

I don't like the hidden scroll bars either, so I've set "Show scroll bars" to "Always". If I understand correctly, Simon wants his web site to display a scroll bar on a system that isn't so configured. I'm not sure why--does it mess with the viewport width or something? Edit: simonw just posted more information on this thread.

tacker2000 6y ago

On mobile it makes sense, since the user has much more direct control over the scrollable area and the area is quite small. The thing is, apple has been trying to converge the desktop and mobile UI into one single interface, and this is a prime example where this approach fails. A visible scrollbar is extremely important to the desktop user, but not really so to the mobile one.

masswerk 6y ago

To be honest, nobody needs text unless they read it. Moreover, all these different typefaces, sizes and tints are a serious threat to any corporate UI identity and professional UX. Especially, as texts from various sources are fighting for the display and user attention. Let's get rid of visible text, unless you hover or swipe on it! Much cleaner UIs and smooth UX are guaranteed, which is exactly what customers want! (Disclaimer: this is obviously in the sarcasm category, but is still meant to provide viable food for a thought experiment.)

SavantIdiot 6y ago

> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this I did.

throwaway4good 6y ago

They are converging their desktop ui towards their mobile ui. The scrollbar is learned functionality; if users know it, they know what to do. If you haven't seen it before, then it is not obvious and it is not an obvious way to interact compared to a scroll gesture on trackpad or a touch screen. Apple can see that more user will be coming that are used to mobile os'es than users experienced in classic desktop ui's. Apple is correct in hiding the scrollbar.

tablespoon 6y ago
> Apple can see that more user will be coming that are used to mobile os'es than users experienced in classic desktop ui's. Modeling a desktop UI off of a mobile UI is just as dumb as modeling a mobile UI off a desktop UI. Each platform has totally different constraints and strengths, shoehorning one into the other will always be a failure.

makecheck 6y ago

Also part of a trend to add more “hover and wait” elements pointlessly: - Can’t see scrollbar without hovering and waiting. - Can’t see folder drag icon in window title without hovering and waiting. - Can’t interact with notifications without hovering and waiting. - Can’t see full menu of options on Full Screen window button without hovering and waiting. Dear Apple: this is a fundamentally backwards design trend that creates major productivity hits. These were arbitrary changes that made things harder to use. In short: there was no “design” happening here, it was just “fiddling”.

efwfwef 6y ago
Oh my... these macos notifications are driving me crazy, you can't just go and close them. I think we should create some rules: - if there's an animation/wait time to get to a UI, it's crap - if users have to be fast to get to a UI, it's crap
Toutouxc 6y ago
> Can’t see full menu of options on Full Screen window button without hovering and waiting. So it's not just me! Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think this is used anywhere else in macOS. It's obviously a button and it opens a normal vanilla macOS list-menu (don't know the term they use) without you clicking it. The hidden folder icon for dragging is a bit annoying, but this infuriates me for some reason. I liked the Mavericks fullscreen button the most, but even the click-and-hold solution was better than this crap.
userbinator 6y ago
The worst part is when some app implements that poorly, so you end up with a scrollbar that disappears while you're still hovered, causing your click to fall through and hit something you didn't want.
- ectopod 6y ago
  Or you're trying to select text from the last line of a text file but the horizontal scrollbar keeps popping up and getting in the way. This absurdity happens in the default text editor in Mint Cinnamon.

Klonoar 6y ago

A weird but possibly relevant question: is this more of a factor for mouse users on macOS? e.g, I use a magic trackpad... it feels very natural to swipe on anything and expect it to move a little (or a lot). You lose this interaction with a mouse, or it's not as simple to do. I actually very much dislike scrollbars after being trackpad only for some years.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

Worst thing about this, for me is at least 5 times a year since this started I have to go back to our engineers and tell them that users can't tell whats scrollable because on windows all the scrollbars are hidden, or appearing in weird places where they shouldn't because the dev team who only tests in Chrome on Mac can't see any scrollbars anyway.

ryandrake 6y ago

Visible scrollbars should be a user preference. If you're on macOS, it's easy to set: System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars. Done. Set it once and move on with your life. If you're a web site, you need to respect the user's preference. Don't play tricks trying to jam a visible scroll bar onto your site if the user has it off in their preferences. Also please don't try to use tricks to hide a scroll bar if the user has it on in preferences. Can't these web sites just focus on their content and not always be worrying about what magical 50 lines of JavaScript they can use to override the user all the time? Maybe I like to browse in a really long 4096 x 256 pixel window, and use a pink background color and Comic Sans font. Deal with it!

jackson1442 6y ago
Websites that mess with my scrollbar preference always break scrolling since they implement their own version of scrolling for no discernible reason.

tengbretson 6y ago

I think it's pretty clear at this point that OS X is meant to be interacted with using a trackpad, and that anything else is getting a second-class experience.

smoldesu 6y ago
+1 for this. One of the most frustrating parts of MacOS is how miserable it is to use it with a mouse. Turning off mouse acceleration needs to get a settings menu entry, stat.
disposekinetics 6y ago
As someone with a hatred for touch based controls this frustrates me, but I think you're wholly correct.

kmfrk 6y ago

One thing I agree on wrt removing scroll bars is that scroll bars make a lot less sense now for articles, because you'll think you're 20% through an article, only for it to turn out that 60% of the article is ads and other crap. In that sense, it feels as if they've lost some of their meaning. For articles, it might be interesting to do something to inform the user that not all content is alike, possibly through metadata.

jedberg 6y ago

After I learned of this issue a while back, I activated always on scrollbars on my Mac. It's amazing how many websites are clearly designed only by people on Macs, who don't realize all the extra scrollbars they have.

jbj 6y ago

my big issue with invisible scrollbars are particularly when they dont appear in small boxes and I dont realize I am passing a scrollable area

thih9 6y ago

This seems easy to solve; at least on MacOS: "System Preferences" -> "Show scroll bars" -> "Always". Update: Ah, I now realise that the goal is to make sure that an app always displays scroll bars. I hope that's impossible; personally I don't mind either scrollbar setting but I do want consistency and I do want apps that respect my OS settings.

taylodl 6y ago

I haven't thought about scroll bars in years! I just use the two finger gesture on my trackpad to scroll. In System Preferences/General you can select Always for 'Show scroll bars' if you so desire. At least Mojave provides that option.

kemonocode 6y ago

I feel like designers at Apple at large with others following in tow to emulate them have been waging a silent war against the scroll bar for a while now. Making it less and less visible until it ultimately disappears sounds reasonable when infinite scrolling (and heavens forbid, scroll hijacking) has rendered it far less useful.

gherkinnn 6y ago

> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this Speak for yourself. I love it. And it works like a charm with magic-y input devices like screens and touch pads. It’s a bit shit with discreetly scrolling mechanisms and on OS’ that don’t do it right.

comprev 6y ago

First thing I do on a new mac account is enable "always on" scrollbars. They give me visual clue as to how much of the information I am reading - am I 10% down the page or 80%?

intrasight 6y ago

The issue with MacOS is a lack of user choice. One reason that I gave it up 20 years back.

sbuk 6y ago
This changed is Mac OS X 10 years ago. You've literally been able to configure this behaviour in system Preferences ever since.
- intrasight 6y ago
  That's good to know. With the arrival of Apple silicon, I am tempted to try again. Will probably wait for M2.

mschuster91 6y ago

It's not just Apple. Android is the same - good luck "catching" the scrollbar to read a long document in Chrome.

VectorLock 6y ago

I think the scroll bar getting smaller is a by-product of it being less prevalent as a usable control since swipe and multi touch scrolling is the fashion now.

timvdalen 6y ago

Is this the correct link? The text appears in this thread, which has much more context: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1369705219110498304 https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1369705219110498304

passivate 6y ago

Can someone explain how this works? For e.g. Can an app choose to have always-visible scrollbars?

naikrovek 6y ago

I really think that Windows 2000-era Windows Forms had the user experience nailed perfectly. It wasn't the prettiest UI paradigm ever, but it was the most functional and easiest to teach. Nothing was omitted, and the user was shown everything they needed to see in order to get a complete idea of the state of the application. I don't think that efforts to hide UI elements that aren't in use is going to prove to be a good idea when we look back at today from the future. Here's a good rule, in my mind: Don't hide UI elements from the user. End of rule. I do not care if it looks better without whatever UI element. The toolbox in my garage would look better if I could only see the tools I needed at the time I need them, and I would return that toolbox (or never buy it in the first place) because it is constantly lying to me about the state of the toolbox, which is absolutely insulting position for a toolbox designer to adopt.

karaterobot 6y ago
I agree with a lot of what you say, but let's take a step back and acknowledge that, on the whole, desktop and mobile UI design has improved a lot in the last 20 years. Interfaces are generally more standardized than they were back then. The type and layout hierarchies are clearer. There are better patterns (and better technologies) both for orienting and getting help when you're lost. There's better feedback from the UI when there's an error or a state change. And that's not even getting into accessibility improvements. It's definitely not better across the board, and the MacOS scrollbars are a good example of that. But, on the whole, it's a lot better than it was, and I wouldn't want to go back and unlearn all the things we've learned in the last 20 years.
- MagnumOpus 6y ago
  Mobile I give you -- of course that is obvious, it would be hard to get worse UI on a 1080p OLED screen that we had on a 50x100 pixel monochrome display. Desktop, no way. Windows 2000/Office 2002 usability by beginners was head and shoulder above today's versions, even at 10x less dev effort and 100x less HD/RAM/CPU usage (yes the functionality was lesser, but the UI wasn't). And add to that the counterfactual of 200,000 man years of development within sane UI paradigms that don't live under the pretense that every Windows PC is a touchscreen tablet, and you could have so much more!

lucasmullens 6y ago

You can use ::-webkit-scrollbar and ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb to force the scrollbar to be visible. It seems to be the easiest way to make sure the user knows a div is scrollable, even if it is fairly hacky.

deleted 6y ago

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wait_a_minute 6y ago

Does anyone really want to see scrollbars even when we’ll be able to scroll with our eyes and even mind?

tbihl 6y ago
Yes. The scroll bar is primarily for showing progress.
- wait_a_minute 6y ago
  good argument, I accept it.

samatman 6y ago

> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this as opposed to some design lead at Apple pushing a weird personal preference for tidyness on their entire user base I strongly prefer the invisible scroll bars in about 95% of cases. I'm either using a trackpad or a scroll wheel on my trackball. In the former case, it's trivially easy to jog the screen up and down or sideways, to see if there's missing content. In the latter case, yeah, horizontal scrolling is challenging, but I'm going to be on a widescreen monitor, so my response is to fill more of the window with the content (quick shout-out to Moom, which makes this easy). It very occasionally happens that I won't notice that there's more content available, and scroll bars would help with that. But I'd rather optimize for the usual case, and get the cleaner lines and extra real estate which go with it.

efwfwef 6y ago
Good luck scrolling to the bottom of a very long page. And then going back up.
- smnscu 6y ago
  You can always click on the scroll bars -- invisible doesn't mean they don't exist, they simply go out of the way when they're not needed (i.e. most of the time / when not scrolling). You can do that on iOS and Android as well, tap and hold on the scroll bar to quickly scroll through an entire document.
  - efwfwef 6y ago
    I just tried that on Chrome on macOS and it doesn't work
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  How exactly is that an issue?
- Toutouxc 6y ago
  This is actually a non-issue (or at least a minor issue for extremely long pages) on a Mac, because macOS has system-wide kinetic scrolling and all Apple input devices use touch sensitive surfaces for scrolling. Not saying you're wrong, it's certainly annoying on mobile devices (compounded by the narrow screens and responsive content).

efwfwef 6y ago

I really hate it too, I don't understand why they do this... Even using Chrome on mac I can't scroll properly if I'm not fast enough to catch the scrollbar after a light scroll.

nikisweeting 6y ago
Why not just set "Always show scrollbars" in System Preferences if you don't like it that way?
- efwfwef 6y ago
  MVP!

disposekinetics 6y ago

I think another part of this problem is that websites are aloud to change scroll bar colors via CSS. The scrollbar is a UI element, not a part of the page and it adds to the problem.

squarefoot 6y ago

Not just Apple. Windows 8 and beyond horrors aside, I have this friend of mine to whom I already installed three Linux machines in the past (1 x XFCE and 2 x Mate) who was 100% satisfied with them. Having brought a new faster laptop for reinstall, I wanted to give him something prettier which wouldn't slow down. Turned out he came back frustrated because of the asinine way KDE Plasma desktop menus behave, literally hiding things from view based on mouse position and not following a click, which is against every rule of good UI programming. Please stop following bad designs just because they're new and/or come from big names; Windows XP UX still beats everything out there both in usability and intuitiveness. If users have to read a manual even to do the most basic things with a new user interface, I call it a failure.

quacked 6y ago
When I was 8-10, I absolutely sailed through new programs in Windows XP. Now that I'm 25, every new thing I want to do in a "new" app (Discord, Slack, Facebook, Zoom, etc.) is precluded by "Google, how do I..." There's so little conceptual integrity in modern applications. I can't stand it.
- jacurtis 6y ago
  Since you mentioned Discord and Slack together here, I have to point out that one of the worst design choices a company can make is hide CRITICAL interaction elements behind a hover state. Slack and Discord are both incredibly guilty of this. Lots of important things that you do everyday is only visible to the user if they are hovering over a certain element on the page. For some of us this isn't as big of a deal. For me, I tend to move my mouse around as I investigate a UI and try to figure out how to do something. But when I watch my mom interact with a website, she works entirely differently. For example if she wanted to edit a message, she wouldn't naturally hover over the message and see the gray pencil appear on the far right of the message in a light gray bubble, and then think to click on the pencil. She is looking for something that says "edit". And she will stop, lean back, take her hand off the mouse, and start looking around with her eyes to the various parts of the app. She will NEVER find the edit button. Even if she is hovering she would probably see the pencil and not have it register that the light gray pencil means, "edit". Furthermore, neither of these apps like to use "buttons". So when you do various things like editing a message or writing a room description, and stuff like this, they just assume you will press the ENTER key. There is no button to save or submit. In discord, light gray text shows up on the bottom that says "Press ENTER to save", but many people won't notice that. Zoom is equally guilty, but not as bad. Zoom seems a little more logical in most places and they tend to use brighter colors on buttons and messages as opposed to Slack and Discord that want to use 50 shades of gray (and not in the sexy way) as the color palette throughout their app. Although I will admit, about once a week I forget how to leave a Zoom call. Zoom makes it far too complicated to do something that every Zoom user will do on every Zoom call, which is inevitably leave the room.

vmception 6y ago

Articles and papers should have dates and an indication of how long it is

shaggyfrog 6y ago

This has always drove me bananas, too. I still have 10.14 but `defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowScrollBars -string "Always"` has worked for me for years now. Does it work in 10.15?

GeekyBear 6y ago

Even a bargain bin mouse has a scroll wheel these days, track pads use a two finger gesture to scroll. If those options don't work for you, change the system preferences back to always showing the scroll bar.

foobarbecue 6y ago

I recently noticed that the Facebook android app never has scrollbars when you're reading a post (not in an infinite-scrolling situation), and I haven't found a way to make them appear.

opk 6y ago

Scrollbars are terrible UI. You have to drag them in the opposite direction to the way the way you want things to move. How far you need to drag the bar to move a certain distance is dependent on the length of the whole document. In general, I think many mistakes were made on early GUIs that simply became entrenched and it is now hard for people to imagine them being any different. I long ago disabled scroll bars in my terminal and text editor and I never miss them.

Rapzid 6y ago
> You have to drag them in the opposite direction to the way the way you want things to move In my mind I'm just moving the viewport down. I'm scrolling down the page, not moving the page up.
aylmao 6y ago
I usually have them disabled too, yeah. I think with modern cursor devices they become redundant— you don't need a UI element to move around the document with the mouse/trackpad, because the mouse/trackpad usually has built-in scrolling with a wheel or gesture. I can see how in the past they were a necessary element though.
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  They're useful for at least knowing what IS scrollable and how much more distance there is left to scroll.
pnt12 6y ago
Drag down to see the content below, up to see above. Total scroll height is 100% of the page and the bar will have an height equivalent to the portion of page you're seeing, allowing to predict from a simple glance how long a page is. I'd say it's quite beautiful in its functional simplicity.

c-smile 6y ago

I'd like us to look on this from different angle: Layout of visible scrollbars, to be precise scrollbars that take space off scrollable, may oscillate - not always has a determined solution in case of `overflow:auto;`, steps: 1. You start layout width without any scrollbars to determine height of the content; 2. If content height exceeds height of the scrollable you will need to show v-scrollbar, and so goto #1; 3. While reducing available width at #2 you may have content width overflow width of scrollable container minus v-scrollbar, so you need to show h-scrollbar that reduces available height, and so goto #2; There are conditions at particular content/container sizes and layout algorithms when the solution oscillates. So `overflow:auto;` (show scrollbars only when needed) is a) quite expensive (layout happens multiple times) and b) not that easy to implement. Floating scrollbars that appear on top of scrollable content and so do not take screen space are technically better.

Koshkin 6y ago

The Gnome desktop has done something (similar?) to the scrollbars (and I hate it).

runjake 6y ago

You can change this behavior in System Preferences -> General-> Show scroll bars -> Always This isn't some snarky comment. 1. A lot of people don't know about this setting. 2. When you set it to "Always", telemetry gets sent to Apple. If enough people do this, they may consider changing the default behavior.

kasabali 6y ago
Telemetry data is used for justifying decisions, not making them.
- runjake 6y ago
  This is painfully true. You must've worked there.

littlecranky67 6y ago

On macOS as well iOS and AFAIK also Android, there is a rubber band/bouncy effect when you scroll to the bottom and reached the end. So you DO get a visual indicator when you are at the end. When you scrolled down and didn't get that "bounce" you know there is more to scroll to. Additionally, the scroll bar will show during scroll and indicate your position in the page. Not saying this is good UX or in any way intuitive, just pointing it out. I think its a matter of taste and long-learned habits. Similar to "natural scroll" that is now the default for macOS. Being >20years a computer user, natural scroll felt just wrong to me, I always switched it back and thought Apple was just plain stupid. This changed when I introduced my father, who had long gotten away with not using computers, to a PC. When I showed him that he can use two-finger scroll on his laptop's trackpad on a website to get down, he said "oh, but its the wrong way!". I was puzzled, and he insisted and told me that its just the wrong way, reaching out to a piece of paper showing me that the content at the bottom would move UP into his view, if he puts 2 finger on the paper and moves them up, too. That was when I realized that "natural scrolling" is actual the physical way of doing it, and my hatred against it was just based that I was used to it in 20+ years of computers being the other way around. It is also the same with Y-Axis in computer games, basically the default setting of the first computer game you ever played determines how you set your controllers (non-) inverted Y-Axis for life :)

deleted 6y ago

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fogof 6y ago

This is especially a problem for me, since I use an extension to make my websites dark. To fix this, I recently downloaded the Rescroller Chrome extension. Not only are my scroll bars now visible, they are a fun lime green (users pick color)! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rescroller/ddehdnnhjimbggeeenghijehnpakijod?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rescroller/ddehdnn...

mdoms 6y ago

I really don't understand it - they refuse to implement a touch screen on their laptops but continue to design for touch interactions.

blackrock 6y ago

I’ve often made mistakes from not seeing extra data, because the data required you to scroll down to see it. It’s a really infuriating situation. And quite a terrible UI design. And by hiding the side scroll bars, it removes your ability to quickly page jump down to the bottom of the page, or to anywhere else on the page, from clicking on the white space of the scroll bars.

swiley 6y ago

It's in the default gnome theme too and changing themes on gnome is kind of a bitch if you're not actually using it as a DE (plus the devs hate it.) Now I have to run some kind of theming daemon (WTF?) just so I can have scroll bars. Sometimes it eats escape keys and launches random crap (occasionally an entire DE) just to throw a full screen modal dialog box telling me that escape isn't mapped to any shortcuts. Defaults should be sane, not fashionable and many people still expect and even need scrollbars.

gowld 6y ago

My Mac shows scrollbars, because I toggled the preference setting.

not2b 6y ago

It isn't just Apple, I'm seeing an increasing number of web sites where the scroll bars disappear, and only re-appear if you click or maybe hover in just the right place. A couple of times I've wasted time not knowing that there was more content the next screen down, or that I needed to scroll some iframe or other object to reveal additional content. Apparently designers have decided that scroll bars are ugly and should disappear when possible, and they get "when possible" wrong sometimes.

sandos 6y ago

Hidden scrollbars are cancer. Me, as a developer, using computers pretty much at least 8 hours per day still struggle with finding that god-damn scrollbar several times per week! What about all the ones with even less know-how, or less patience?

wyuenho 6y ago

The Mac's hidden scroll bar is normally quite usable in Safari and Firefox, when you move the cursor to the side and start scrolling, it'll automatically pop up, with a thick bar that you can hold on to with the pointing device. That is, unless you are trying to figure out the exact behavior on Chrome or some Electron app, which is half the most used desktop apps on the macOS these days, and took you a while to figure it's actually a bug in Chrome. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=678537 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=678537

stjohnswarts 6y ago

One of the first things I do is make scroll bars always on. I wish it was opt out rather than opt in but I never lost my mind over it.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

I personally prefer auto-hiding scrollbars for my own general use. But I was recently in the same position as OP trying to make horizontally scrollable sections more discoverable and it’s really a pain. OP is using JS so there’s a lot of options, but my use case was CSS-only and I ended up giving up on the scrollbar visibility and using a “scroll shadow” instead—where overflowing content displays a small shadow over the content which fades out at the end of the scroll. It’s not as clear as an explicit scrollbar but it’s a fairly common pattern users do often recognize.

godshatter 6y ago

On the topic of scrollbars and UX, I like it when a program shows a mockup of the rest of the window in the scrollbar area. For example, Kate from KDE does this. It's helpful not just to know where you are, but to see the basic structure of the document that's left to view.

therealdrag0 6y ago

I've been using the "rescroller" plugin in Chrome for years now. Nice to force a fixed solid grey scroll bar.

BluSyn 6y ago

I hate to say it; this entire thread is perfect case study of why engineers should never be put in charge of UI design. This is how you end up with a UX like AWS.

WalterBright 6y ago

I've noticed another trend towards very narrow scroll bars and a dot-like tab. They're annoyingly difficult to grab and move. Then there are the web pages which simply will not scroll smoothly, because scrolling changes the content of the page. It's really irritating. Harumph.

manicdee 6y ago

It gets worse: 1. Plug a monitor and external mouse into your MBA. 2. Now close the lid. 3. Open Safari, navigate to Tesla.com. 4. Open the hamburger menu, click the country down the bottom. 5. Try scrolling the "Select Your Region" content to pick United Kingdom. If you use the mouse wheel, the div doesn't scroll. You can click-and-drag to highlight text and as you drag past the bottom of the div it will scroll. Now open the lid of the MBA and the div can be scrolled using two finger gesture on the trackpad.

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 6y ago

Why is this a problem? Scrollbars are unnecessary and ugly

Hammershaft 6y ago

I have a pet theory that as design is oriented around the conventions and abilities that users bring to the product, designers are couched in cultures and locations where users are highly tech literate. This anchors designers expectations of the average user towards the high end, and allows designers to justify stripping away ui hints in favor of aesthetics.

CoconutPilot 6y ago

"If you can't make it good, at least make it look good." I guess Apple has conceded! https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_gates_382270 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_gates_382270

bradgessler 6y ago

I’ll say it: I prefer it this way.

t0r0nat0r 6y ago

Lol people here need to chill. I like apple’s UX and i think the point here is a uniform experience across platforms. That being said, I think it works perfectly fine like it is now IMO.

LoveMortuus 6y ago

I believe that design should be done in such a way that no matter your background you can still use the tool without having to spend more time learning then actually using the tool.