28 ms·

Scrollbars are becoming a problem

• hi41 3y ago
  With Windows, I can’t tell which app I am looking at especially with browsers which look similar (chrome, edge). It’s hard to tell which application is highlighted in the task bar.
• NateSwift 3y ago
  I feel like the iOS scroll bars fall into this a lot as well. They’re so hard to consistently get with you finger
  • virtualized 3y ago
    TIL you can actually drag Scrollbars on iOS. They are so tiny I would never have assumed they react to a touch.
    • jprete 3y ago
      That actually gives me a reverse accessibility problem on iOS, because I will try to drag-scroll at the edge of the screen but accidentally grab the scrollbar, which goes in the opposite direction.
  • EForEndeavour 3y ago
    My god... I've been using iOS for ten years and your comment just made me realize you can actually press onto and grab the razor-thin scrollbar that disappears about a second of idle time. What a farce.
    • wilg 3y ago
      The hit target is much bigger than the visual scrollbar. It is useful to drag the scrollbar for very long lists, but hardly the norm.
• superkuh 3y ago
  >gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface overlay-scrolling false "Don't rely on gsettings. They are private and users are not supposed to be setting them theirselves. Don't complain when they suddenly stop working." -- every gtk dev I've ever talked to. That said, I've applied those firefox about:config fixes and it's much better. Whew.
  • smegsicle 3y ago
    gnome is unusable
    • superkuh 3y ago
      gsettings don't just apply to gnome desktop environment. They impact the entire gtk ecosystem of dozens of desktop environments and innumerable gtk programs.
• LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  Whenever I read a piece like this or another UX blog, it just becomes so obvious how little we care about a11y. “Good” (as in accessible) design is pretty boring and decluttered compared to most modern expectations of web apps. I read Adam Silver’s book on forms and came away realizing that we’re doing it entirely wrong from an a11y standpoint but that’s just not a priority.
  • rubyfan 3y ago
    I find it ironic that in order for your comment to be accessible the reader must lookup “a11y” to find that it means “accessibility”.
    • DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      Relatedly, "i18n" is hard for non-native speakers to understand too, how ironically apt.
      • accoil 3y ago
        It's hard for native speakers too. Numerical contractions aren't part of normal English (i.e they don't seem to exist outside of IT).
        • Kerrick 3y ago
          Numerical ones don’t seem to exist outside of IT, but other fields do the same strategy of abbreviating common long words by keeping only a letter or two. The non-numerical way is to just replace the rest with an “x” like “txn” for “transaction” in finance or “pax” for “passengers” in transportation or “sx” for “symptoms” in medicine.
          • accoil 3y ago
            Neat, that's one mystery solved. I have seen "x" used like that, but didn't know how it worked.
      • 3y ago
• et1337 3y ago
  The best part is that every website now feels it necessary to completely override the unusable skinny built-in browser scroll bar, then add a useless, non-interactive horizontal progress bar at the top of the screen instead.
  • dredmorbius 3y ago
    As I'd commented on the Fediverse thread discussing this post, the distraction of having a horizontal animation responding to a vertical movement is absolutely maddening. On desktops, I'll remove that horizontal bar via uBlock Origin's element remover or a Stylus CSS rule.
• tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  Maybe the solution is to improve the accessibility tools, not hack scrollbars. Assistive technologies should not just try to emulate the computer, but try to also use their specific strengths. For example, shouldn't eyetrackers be able to use blink or eyeroll gestures, or have a virtual "scroll down" "button" (focus target) underneath the screen?
  • DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    > Maybe the solution is to improve the accessibility tools, not hack scrollbars I doubt you meant it, but your post reads like you're advocating less-abled people purchase (often expensive) eye-trackers instead of making scrollbars generally more usable for everyone.
    • tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
      The article specifically mentions eye tracker users as an affected group. Everybody who tries to actually use the scroll bar as a handle (rather than a non-interactive position indicator for use with the other scrolling methods) would have a problem, because they're not really meant to be used that way and most people don't use them that way (which is why they keep shrinking). Unfortunately the article doesn't mention how people who don't use an eye tracker, can't use a scroll wheel/touchscreen-dragging (or adapted replacement for either!), but could use a "normal-sized" scrollbar, are actually interacting with their devices. I imagine that overlapping group to be rather small.
      • DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
        > because they're not really meant to be used that way ...how do you think people scrolled documents in Word before mice had scroll-wheels?
        • dragonwriter 3y ago
          > ...how do you think people scrolled documents in Word before mice had scroll-wheels? With the page up and page down keys, mostly, though you could drag the scrollbar. Not sure about Word, but I believe many apps had a keyboard + mouse combination that enabled scrolling with any mouse movement without interacting with the scollbar, as well.
• Aeolun 3y ago
  I don’t think this is UX/UI designers not knowing/caring about accessibility. It’s their bosses saying the tiny scrollbar is preferred because it sells 20% more due to the aesthetics being better. Who cares about the 0.5% of disabled people that weren’t likely to buy your app anyway. Same for browsers, FF may care about accessibility, but they won’t lose the browser wars (bit of a moot point by now, but eh) because most people like Chrome’s tiny scrollbars.
  • pmontra 3y ago
    Do Gnome and GTK sell any better because they use tiny scrollbars? Or Macs, or Windows? Apps do what the OS let them do.
    • Aeolun 3y ago
      I mean, take an average person, show them the UI of a current mac, then the UI of windows 95, and ask them which they prefer? It’s not the only factor, but it is a factor.
      • pseudalopex 3y ago
        It would be more sensible to show them a current Windows. Or Windows 7. Or a Mac with visible scroll bars. Or ask them if they would like Windows 11 more with the scroll bar size setting removed.
      • pmontra 3y ago
        To prevent a familiarity bias we should ask them the same question in 1995 with time machined screenshots of current MacOS downsampled to 640x480px.
        • hulitu 3y ago
          A border of 1 pixel on a UHD display scalled for a display of 640x480 is 0 pixels. You can make the same exercise, trying to run for ex Windows in a virtual machine with a 640x480 screen.
• epistasis 3y ago
  I run into so many websites that I think are completely broken because they have a scollable popover or some other weird element, but it's impossible to tell that there is content because the scroll bar is hidden on this small interior frame. Absolutely infuriating. I blame iOS and macOS for encouraging this insanity and starting the fashion trend, and tangentially whoever pushed along this whole "flat" UI trend that makes it so hard to guess at what is what. UI is communication, and UI designers have decided that mumbling is cool.
  • jwells89 3y ago
    In the context of the original iPhone at least, hiding the scrollbar when not scrolling makes some amount of sense… when your screen is 3.5" in size and your goal is to render content with "desktop" fidelity, there's not a whole lot of room for a scrollbar, plus most people aren't going to be interacting with the scrollbar. For desktop OSes where the smallest screen being used is much larger on the other hand there's not much of a good reason to hide them.
    • f33d5173 3y ago
      > there's not much of a good reason to hide them. It looks nicer + you can just use the scroll wheel. A lot of the UI affordances lost over the last decade or two are unfortunate, but complaints about scroll bars seem to be purely baby duck syndrome.
      • jwells89 3y ago
        I don't mind having them hidden as an option, but there should be an OS user level override that all apps and sites *obey*. macOS has the first half covered, but electron apps and some browsers have yet to cover the latter half.
      • ryandrake 3y ago
        As the article says, not everyone can use a scroll wheel, and not everyone even has a scroll wheel or touchpad. I personally find using mouse scroll wheels quite painful due to RSI caused from decades of mouse abuse. Yet, designers find scroll bars and up-and-down scroll arrows icky so fuck me, I guess. :(
• Pannoniae 3y ago
  I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone. I've recently switched to using KDE with the Oxygen theme and it's a joy to use without any eye strain. These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down application) It's blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users' needs, not even in FOSSland. I am not entirely sure why this is the case but it's a sad regression from the days when we had good-looking, functional, accessible and snappy software. Not locked-down, unthemable electron bullshit. Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such if the UIs had any contrast and were legible.
  • jfim 3y ago
    > I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. We've hit peak usability about twenty years ago, in the Windows 2000 era. The screenshot in the article is actually from about that era, it's one of the early 10.x (10.3 I believe) OS X releases.
    • masswerk 3y ago
      Arguably, Snow Leopard was peak interaction design. Just for the highly functional visual grouping of elements. (MacOS has drifted off from this quite a distance, since.)
      • eadmund 3y ago
        > Arguably, Snow Leopard was peak interaction design. System 7 or 8, methinks. Clean, cool and collected.
    • agloe_dreams 3y ago
      Today in HN: A billion armchair rants about Windows 2000 being the best UI forgetting just how much it actually sucked at usability or accessibility features.
• dredmorbius 3y ago
  My own ~2019 rant on the ongoing deprecation of scrollbars appears to have succumbed to another digital scourge: bitrot. The HN submission (320 comments) here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511> Ello has been down for months now with issues at TalentHouse AG (apparently in or near bankruptcy), and archives of that site at both the Wayback Machine and the (usually successful) Archive Today ... show no actual content best I can tell. Sigh.
• scoot 3y ago
  > And while the bars were shrinking, another feature silently disappeared: buttons to click and hold down to scroll left/right in increments. This feature still exists, with a larger clickable surface, but with lower affordance – the entire area above and below the scroll bar is a "button" for exactly that purpose.
  • masswerk 3y ago
    However, this area moves the screen a page per click, instead of a line per click. It actually replaces another, now long forgotten scrollbar button found on the Xerox Star and in some Lisa applications.
  • gmfawcett 3y ago
    Not really the same feature. Typically, scroll-bar clicks will scroll by pages, while the little buttons will scroll by lines. Also: using the little buttons, you can position the cursor once and then click repeatedly for repeated movements, taking you ultimately to the very top or bottom of the page. But when clicking the scroll bar, page movement generally stops as soon as the slider moves underneath your cursor.
• autoexec 3y ago
  Once again I have to give firefox credit for giving users the tools in about:config to disable this. It's cute fluff at best and annoying/abusive at worst. The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars.
  • dredmorbius 3y ago
    This even works on Mobile, though I'd have to look up the specific incantation to override this. I think this might be it: <https://www.makeuseof.com/change-firefox-scrollbar-style/ https://www.makeuseof.com/change-firefox-scrollbar-style/>
  • wilkystyle 3y ago
    Let's include smooth scrolling in that list, too (whether scrolling with the mouse wheel or moving between words I Ctrl-F for on the page). Thankfully you can override this with uBlock Origin.
  • sundvor 3y ago
    And on the flip side, Chrome - just had the biggest laugh when I got to this point: "Imagine being able to configure anything useful in chrome ever." Overall, a very well written article - kudos to the author. (I've made the switch to FF again myself after Edge just got too annoying with their constant nagging about Bing search and other features. And the prompt to restore tabs. Just STFU and stop it already.)
    • moring 3y ago
      Could you explain this point to me? I just checked and out of those two, it was _Firefox_ that has tiny, barely visible, vanishing scroll bars and _Chrome_ that has thick, well-visible, persistent ones. (And no, I didn't configure that on either) The only thing that IMHO needs improvement in Chrome scroll bars is that the knob is light grey on lighter grey.
    • alpaca128 3y ago
      One useful thing you can enable in Chrome is tab bar scrolling. Without this setting the tab bar is broken by default, if you open too many tabs on it the bar will simply not show some of them because there's no room left, while all remaining ones are just a few pixels wide.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• g-b-r 3y ago
  Yeah I still can't believe that on Android you can't interact with them (and they're nearly impossible to see to begin with)
• chrismarlow9 3y ago
  Can someone tell me how to make the Mac os native scroll bar wider? It's infuriating trying to grab the little skinny bar. I'm asking here because it seems related and hopefully someone reading this works at Apple or has a solution.
• kvonhorn 3y ago
  You know what's an accessibility problem for a lot of people over 40? White text on a dark background. I don't think I'll ever get tired of hearing people advocate for making web pages readable for people my age. Yeah, opening up the inspector and updating the author's CSS made it readable for me, but made the shell script unreadable.
  • teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    Why do you find it hard to read?
    • irrational 3y ago
      Biology. I’m in my 50s and get an eye exam every year. According to my optometrist my prescription has been stable for about a decade, but I can definitely tell the difference. My eyes do not focus very fast anymore, my eyes do not adjust going from a light space to a dark space or vice versa very fast anymore. I now have to hold books and my phone away from me to bring them into focus. Same with white text on dark backgrounds. I used to use dark themes for everything, but it just doesn’t work for me anymore. I’ve mentioned these to my optometrist and they say that it happens to everyone with age.
      • reportgunner 3y ago
        What about yellow text on brown background like [0] ? I use this combo in my editor to avoid changing to light theme on bright days and dark theme at night. [0] https://i.imgur.com/Ynvrm3p.png https://i.imgur.com/Ynvrm3p.png
        • irrational 3y ago
          It is not as easy to read as black on a light background.
    • skydhash 3y ago
      Not that old, but I have astigmatism. And every spot of light has a glow around it. Black on white is better because the characters only got thinner. But light characters on dark background is like having tiny projectors and the shapes are not recognizable at a glance.
• masswerk 3y ago
  My fellow readers, do not succumb to the heresies expressed in that blog post! Clearly, the future is in eye tracking data streamed to the cloud, where an AI will predict the scroll target, to be revealed by the application. Most cheerfully, this will not only be a subscription based service, but will also solve the problems with ad attention. ;-)
• hypercube33 3y ago
  Windows 11 has these awful scroll bars - at least on dark mode, that are a hair thin and the bar color is the same almost as the background scroll area and I for the life of me, at under 40 years old, cannot ever figure out /where/ the damn button portion is. Windows 11 also likes to auto-hide scroll bars, and minimize them otherwise which is super weird to me since its supposedly a touch friendly OS (Designed for Surface and Phones as Windows 10X supposedly)
  • freeone3000 3y ago
    Mobile devices have no visible scrollbar unless you are actively scrolling. This is the look they were going for when they say “touch first”. Users are not expected to use the scroll wheel to jump, or click, or do any maneuver more precise than selecting a block of text.
• owlstuffing 3y ago
  Also, the up/down buttons are disappearing in most UIs, in some cases providing no alternative to scroll up/down a notch. Yeah, terrible scroll bar UI these days is a PIA.
• irrational 3y ago
  > designers do not sit with non technical users to conduct usability testing It wouldn’t matter if they did. I’ve been a web developer for nearly 25 years and have worked with many many designers. You know they care about? Pixel perfect layouts that match their “vision”. UX isn’t even a fleeting thought.
  • ryandrake 3y ago
    While not all designers are like this, many are. I've seen designers come out of actual UX studies involving real users, saying "Well, while this is one data point, we think those users are wrong." There's no getting through.
• nine_k 3y ago
  The author sees half the problem and offers the worse half of a solution. A scrollbar is not only a control, it's also an indicator. It shows where your viewport is relative to the bigger view, e.g. a long list. Hiding scrollbars, like some [redacted] GUIs like macOS do, is just acutely impolite, much like making buttons indistinguishable from text, or putting light grey text on a light grey background. A solution exists, and is nearly universally implemented: scroll wheels on a mouse, and scroll gestures on a trackpad. Very, very rarely do I find a view which can be scrolled by scrollbars, but cannot be scrolled by the standard trackpad gesture, or by a mouse wheel. (BTW my mouse also allows horizontal scrolling using the wheel; so do trackpoint controls, too.) Such scrolling does not require the pointer to even be at a scrollbar; the pointer just need to hover over the desired view / control / widget. This is really easy to achieve with imprecise input devices, unsteady hands, and poor vision. But with this natural, easy way of scrolling one starts to really miss scrollbars in their indicator role. (Regarding minimaps: sometimes they are helpful, sometimes not so much. I in particular find them unhelpful and bulky for text editing, but of course I'm all in favor of having them as an option for those who enjoy them.)
  • pitterpatter 3y ago
    >A solution exists, and is nearly universally implemented: scroll wheels on a mouse, and scroll gestures on a trackpad. So you didn't read the article huh. The very first paragraph says: >“Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. Or literally the next paragraph about difficulties small/hidden scrollbars cause with other input methods, e.g. eye trackers.
    • wilg 3y ago
      What's stopping those input methods from having a special scroll gesture that is optimal for their input medium? But sure, have an accessibility override for giant scrollbars.
    • nine_k 3y ago
      I thinks that of all things, eye trackers and voice controllers have the easiest time sending whatever scrolling commands, without a need to fiddle with scrollbars.
• mostlylurks 3y ago
  They're getting less usable as well. One of the mice I use daily has had a broken scroll wheel for a few months now and I've been too lazy and/or busy to replace it, and it's shocking how broken scroll bars are if you try to actually use them. Infinitely scrolling content and content that resizes itself when it loads in very frequently combine in ways that make the scroll bar jump around in ways that make navigation very difficult.
• startupsfail 3y ago
  Browsers-based Outlook is a new low, I think. Scrollbar inception.
• smitty1e 3y ago
  > On the one paw, recompile my GUI theme? - but hey I’m a gentoo user I do that every friday anyway, I could just drop a patch in I guess… RECOMPILE MY GUI THEME?? Gentoo is a great learning exercise, but Arch has me focusing on doing things.
• ack_complete 3y ago
  Add the newest Steam UI to the list of shame, not only for having skinny scrollbars, but also for having the 5px wide hitbox end several pixels short so that slamming the mouse against the right edge of the maximized window misses the scrollbar.
  • epistasis 3y ago
    This is why, in the good old days, UI folks got all worked up when programmers reimplemented basic controls, because they always did it half-assed and could not connect into all the other parts of the OS that users can configure, or have connections to accessibility software, etc... I remember some horrors in my lifetime: WinAMP skins, browser skins, people recklessly ignoring all of the wisdom collected on asktog.com... But the horrors became so frequent that we all became numb, and now even Windows ships with more UI disarray than could have been imagined in the early 2000s... The hardest part of becoming a greybeard is realizing what could have been, that we have abandoned.
  • deng 3y ago
    Actually, I don't really mind the scrollbar behavior in Steam, as the UNCHANGEABLE font size is so friggin tiny I can't see anything anyway (no, the "scale text" option does not fix this for me).
• ryandrake 3y ago
  I hate to be That Guy, but I wonder if there is any USA case history precedent where the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) was used to successfully 'motivate' companies to fix inaccessible software? It seems like an obvious fit. Clearly, The Market is failing to adequately solve the problem.
• oldbbsnickname 3y ago
  There are 2 modern UX problems: - Lack of affordances when scrolling is needed, especially with disappearing scroll bars or ones that never make themselves known - Tiny scroll bars: not just on the desktop, but on touch interfaces too
• avsteele 3y ago
  This isn't limited to being a problem for those with fine motor control issues. The wheel has a linear/constant speed, which is a hindrance for very long pages. Also, wheel scroll can behave differently depending on where the mouse cursor is or has focus. The scroll bar has none of these problems.
• rr808 3y ago
  I was going to add to the complaints but realized I always scroll with touchpad or drag up/down on my phone. Maybe scroll bars are kind of obsolete except for visual clues.
  • phkahler 3y ago
    >> Maybe scroll bars are kind of obsolete except for visual clues. On mobile maybe. On desktop absolutely not. And in that case it's detrimental for them to be small.
    • rr808 3y ago
      For my desktop I usually use the wheel.
      • bandrami 3y ago
        The wheel doesn't tell you where you are in the page, which is why scrollbars are good (I don't know that I've ever used them to change position, personally; that's not what they're "for" in my brain). It's like how Safari has this weird insistence on hiding URLs. Every other browser tooltips or status bars a link you hover over, but no: we're apparently just supposed to click blind. For that matter the address bar doesn't even show you the full URL you're at right now unless you enter edit mode.
      • acuozzo 3y ago
        How do you scroll to the middle or end of an incredibly-long document? e.g., 200+ pages, if printed.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • rr808 3y ago
          Actually I have a Logitech mx so can spin the wheel and it keeps going round for 10s+.
    • 3y ago
• Groxx 3y ago
  Minimaps are the best, absolutely agreed. Large, visible, and provides room for metadata like selected lines, errors, etc. I want them practically everywhere, even when they don't seem to make sense - widescreen monitors mean there's more than enough wasted horizonal space, it wasn't doing anything useful anyway.
• bastawhiz 3y ago
  I'm generally not a person to die on hills like this, but the disappearing scroll bars on macOS have really been a point of significant contention for me. Sometimes I just want to click and drag a scrollbar. And it seemingly takes an act of god to get it to appear (you can't just hover, you have to two-finger scroll first). And then in order to get it to stay, you need to keep your mouse horizontally positioned on the scroll bar. If you click+drag and your mouse moves away from the scroll bar area and release the mouse button (even if your mouse does not move), the scroll bar disappears. In my perfect world, the scroll bar would appear if you hover in the right spot for long enough. And if you drag it and release, it would stick around until 1.) you move the cursor >0 pixels and 2.) a reasonable timeout passes, or it's obvious you've moving your cursor away from the scroll bar. I'll note that Slack's desktop app _just works_ the way I wish scroll bars would work (it just appears and stays if your cursor is in the content area), though I think it's because they implement them manually.
  • tom_ 3y ago
    I've found most macOS software is actually pretty good at respecting the scrollbar visibility preference, not that we should expect anything less given how often we are told that the Mac is where you go for good UX, and that software developers for it know what they're doing. (Acrobat recently got this wrong, and I was hearted to discover there's a fairly active thread an the Adobe forums about how much of a fuckup this is. I am not alone! I added a comment or two, of course)
  • krackers 3y ago
    >And it seemingly takes an act of god to get it to appear (you can't just hover, you have to two-finger scroll first) It's supposed to show up by just doing a two finger tap. It works in native apps. For some reason chrome doesn't respect this though, I think because maybe they reimplement some part of it on their own.
• wruza 3y ago
  Apple started the trend and the web picked it up. But as usual, web had no underlying mechanisms to retain the UX integrity. Thin scrollbars work by being transparently overlaid over text and grow in size on hover, without bothering the main layout. Browsers can’t do that universally. So what you get is a windows/linux-style static scrollbar of an annoyingly small width. Or a js abomination that partially simulates it and stops working randomly on some mobile devices. Sure, you may blame designers. But these original Apple scrollbars are actually fine and they look good. The problem is where it was for the last 20+ years: we are using slow and clumsy 40MLoCs as an applications and media platform. They need TENS of years to add support for primitive things like flexible boxing or grid layouts or linear layout constraints (oh wait, no). So there’s a chance we’ll get these overlay scrollbars in 2040+.
• OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  I've bookmarked this post and have had this frustration for a long time. I implemented the Firefox fixes and have a nice, rectangular scrollbar that my old eyes can actually see. Only thing it took a while to figure out was setting the "Always On" part. I struggled to find that within Firefox and then realized it was an OS setting. I found it in Preferences on my Macbook and now, my FF life is markedly better. Chalk me up as preferring the older 3D style interfaces with the skeuomorphic features. I have to use Windows 10 at work and the new flat interfaces with thin or invisible elements are hell.
• botanical 3y ago
  I actually love having a small scrollbar. On Firefox, I have it as a tiny sliver that only shows up when scrolling. :root{ scrollbar-width: thin; } And: user_pref("widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style", 3); user_pref("ui.scrollbarDisplayOnMouseMove", 0); in about:config You can have minimaps enabled in Emacs and Firefox, but I don't see a use for them, to be honest.
  • expensive_news 3y ago
    I also like the small and usually invisible scroll bars that the author is against, like the ones in MacOS. Though I only just realized that I can’t remember the last time I have used one to scroll the page - for me they always act as indicators. The only scroll bar I ever use as a scroll bar is the one in VS Code, which I absolutely love. Displayed next to a miniature, much taller version of your document, with little bands for highlighted or searched for variables, that scroll bars is, in my opinion, peak design.
• rendaw 3y ago
  Scrollbars are terrible, but it's crazy that instead of improving them they just got rid of them, like saying "well let's pretend this problem doesn't exist". When you have a huge page, the drag island becomes miniscule. They at least set a minimum height for it, but you still need to carefully hunt for it. When you have a huge page, dragging the island jumps a huge amount, sometimes multiple pages. Scrolling gradually requires keeping your finger firmly on the mouse button which screws up your hand muscles. When infinite scrolling the cursor keeps smacking into the bottom of the screen, or loading new content causes the absolute scroll to suddenly jump pages. Removing the island, having scroll non-linear based on movement distance, double clicking for absolute movement, an interaction for continuous scrolling (right click?), etc. Or maybe doing something like youtube does with the video scrollbar, pulling up for zoom in etc. There's a million things to try here... and what they do try is sweeping it under the rug.
  • masswerk 3y ago
    Mind that continuous scrolling was a function of the scroll buttons (arrow buttons), which were axed in favor of visual simplicity. You just kept them pressed for continuous scrolling. On macOS, absolute scrolling is still Option-clicking on the scroll track, while simple clicking is paging. (I don't know, if this is still a thing on other GUIs, though, but I hope it is.) The size of the scroll thumb gives an indication for what a screen size is in relation to the document and what amount of movement is required when dragging it. (This was a noteworthy contribution by Windows, while it was also arguably bad about minimum sizes.) Most of this had been addressed by the original design. Loading additional content will be always a problem, though, since it necessarily breaks any spacial relations already established. (But this is really a problem of infinite-scroll designs, which simply do not match the established UI controls, without caring to provide any suitable replacement or work around or even suggesting a metaphor for this. Which, in fairness, is to be expected for what is essentially a marketing instrument.) Scroll wheels and trackpad gestures will be arguably superior for continuous scrolling for most users, but cover continuous scrolling only and none of the other options provided by the scrollbar (especially, a fully implemented one.) – There's much to do in order to catch up.
  • reportgunner 3y ago
• ajolly 3y ago
  I would love a way to force a large scroll bar to always be active on Android. (Any browser that can do this would be fine)
• Tempest1981 3y ago
  Can we talk about window borders? I have multiple overlapping VS Code windows open, all with black backgrounds and black borders. No drop shadows. It's impossible to see where one windows frame/border is, sitting on top of another. This should be an OS thing, but apparently it's an app thing. And VS Code "withdrew" support for configuring borders: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/160159 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/160159
  • Tempest1981 3y ago
    More on borders (and title bars) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37865824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37865824 My theory is that designers target users viewing 1 full-screen window at a time. Their model user never moves or resizes a window, or opens more than 3 tabs/documents a day, as they sit at their 13" laptop in an ideally-lit room with no reflections.
    • kps 3y ago
      Then you get programs having splits or panels or whatever they're called for multiple documents, which is just an internal window manager that's not as good as my regular window manager.
• Eduard 3y ago
  > blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users' needs, not even in FOSSland. you make it sound as if FOSS GUI toolkits ever had a pleasant user experience.
  • tmtvl 3y ago
    The way I've heard it told GNOME 2 was the cat's meow. I myself only switched to GNU/Linux in 2012, so I missed it. Unity (Ubuntu's erstwhile competitor to GNOME 3) with the HUD was quite the joy to use, though.
• FpUser 3y ago
  The whole "modern" design has decided to to tell big fat Fuck You to any semblance of ergonomics and sanity. Having to scroll big empty screen to see anything even remotely useful is the apotheosis. Total disrespect of the users.
• codalan 3y ago
  It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the window. It's the way that tabbing between text boxes either doesn't behave the way you'd expect, or doesn't work at all. It's all the tooltips that interrupt and litter the interface and, at times, block out things that you are looking at. And 95% of the time, the information provided in these tooltips are redundant or useless. It's amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people. Applications like Postman, Teams (and pretty much all of MSFT's applications these days), Chrome, and Insomnia should be case studies on how to not design user interfaces. They are about as bad as desktop software gets. The biggest sin is that this would be a non-issue if these things were configurable at the windowing system level and could not be overriden by app developers. But the trend has gone in the opposite direction; instead of providing more configurability, Windows and Gnome/GTK are actually taking away options that have existed before.
  • skylanh 3y ago
    > Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background I thought this was my slowly acquired technical debt: "what option have I missed? Is this like Aero and I have to turn it off?" The "where the eff is the scrollbar thumb? ffs" situation has occurred more times then I care for.
  • masswerk 3y ago
    > it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. This is what the resize box is/was for. (It's actually draggable edges with no "meat" to them, which introduce the conflict by overloading an element, which is also just a pixel wide.) *) The resize box used to sit below the very bottom of the vertical scrollbar, just below the down arrow button, as a distinct and dedicated handle for resizing windows. Mind how this is in the direct vicinity of any scroll buttons which may be used to see more than what is exposed by the initial view. It's the quasi "natural" origin and anchor of any basic interactions with the viewport. (Somewhat ironically, while the resize box has mostly vanished from application UIs, it is still rendered by web browsers in certain circumstances. E.g., with textarea elements with scrollbars and resize enabled. With most UIs, there will be no related scroll buttons anymore, though.)
• masswerk 3y ago
  Regarding minimaps: I thought, these were great, too, but then I discovered that I find them rather irritating and that I actually don't use them. I guess, this is, because you have to maintain a mental mapping of that document and how it is organized, already, for the minimap to make sense. But, then, referring to that visual mapping of what you're already mapping in a much more abstract sense, seems – at least for me – to be rather adding friction than being helpful. The scrollbar, being both highly abstract and visceral/tangible at the same time, is hard to beat.
  • syldarion 3y ago
    Agreed. Once a file/page reaches a certain size, I find minimaps to be a mostly unintelligible blob. Maybe it'd be solved by just making it bigger, but then we push into the problems of screen real estate and what not.
    • masswerk 3y ago
      I think, it's also, instead of just approximating the position in the document, we now feel compelled to translate our mental image to a visual one and to match this with the rendering in the minimap. Which introduces an additional step of dis-abstraction, and what is essentially abstract (text) now has to be treated like a material object, as well. Moreover, if the overall structure isn't as varied as it may be the case with code, it doesn't provide much significance, anyways. (It may depend on where you're located on the aphantasia to photographic memory continuum, though. I'm definitely closer to the former than to the latter extreme.)
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    I agree. I can put up with the minimaps, but I dislike them quite a bit. The traditional scrollbar appears to be pretty close to ideal.
• hackerlight 3y ago
  Worse is when UI designers intentionally put a delay to scrolling to give it an elastic band feeling. Bro I just want to scroll down, not wait 400 milliseconds for your stupid thing to respond. Why can't they just minimize latency and make things intuitive. No rows of indecipherable icons that we are forced to memorize. No having to hover our mouse over each icon and waiting 1.5 seconds for the text to explain what it is that each icon is doing. Put plain text there, or make it so the tooltip immediately displays. We are people, we use 10s of pieces of software, we can't memorize 10*10 different icons.
• marcus_holmes 3y ago
  Literally just ran into this problem 15 mins ago. Went to the HTTP RFC 9110 to check on the proper meaning of a HTTP response [0]. The list of sections on the right is scrollable, but there's no indication that it is, and no scroll bar unless you click on it and try to scroll it. The page as it loads on my screen looks like it stops at section 4.2.1. and there's no indication that there are more sections. Took me a few moments to work out how to get to what I needed. Which is bad design, right? If you're confusing the user to make some aesthetic "improvement" then that's bad. I don't even know that removing scroll bars is an aesthetic improvement. Why do this? [0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110.html#name-302-found https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110.html#name-302-found
  • masswerk 3y ago
    I defence of that web site, I do see a vertical scroll bar for this section. But I'm also one of those funny individuals who check that "Show scrollbars" is set to "always" in the system preferences, after each update. (On macOS, it's not the default, but it's still an option.)
    • marcus_holmes 3y ago
      true, this might be on me for not specifying that in Firefox
      • masswerk 3y ago
        At least on macOS, this is a gloabal system setting, which also applies to any web browsers. (I can't speak on the subject of other OSes/GUIs, though.)
• graycat 3y ago
  To me, now, the Hacker News user interface has become one of the best on the Web!
• floren 3y ago
  Preach! I complained about this a while back, noting that even when we had a 512x342 screen on the original Mac, there were chunky usable scrollbars... but now with 4k screens, we can't spare the pixels! http://jfloren.net/b/2022/7/15/0 http://jfloren.net/b/2022/7/15/0
• amber_glow 3y ago
  Right on point. I don't want to play a sniper game when scrolling things. My hand was getting tired of just trying to grab a scrollbar with a mouse. I did the same thing some time ago, increased min width of GTK and Firefox scrollbars to like 32 or something, my life only got better after that.
• tgrass 3y ago
  Seems historically similar to the 70s/80s when automakers started positioning an alternator in such a way that it required removing an axle to replace it.
• cgtyoder 3y ago
  Is there a way to increase the size of the Safari scrollbar?
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  So what? Next thing you know, people are gonna be crying for "accessibility features", like "being able to use computers if you have a disability". Or even worse, normal people asking for changes, just because they want a different (they say "better", but whatever) experience as a user! Who cares if a few million people have a hard time using my app? Works fine for me! And that's what matters.
• tambourine_man 3y ago
  The unprecedented success of the iPhone is mostly to blame for all of this madness. Too much success can lead to missteps. When you’re selling gazillions of hammers, everything starts to look like nails. Hiding most of the UI was genius for such a tiny screen with a simple and very limited OS. People loved it. It’s was tremendously empowering, they could finally own a computing device they can understand or at least not screw up. But a computer has a much larger display and does a lot more. It’s OK for it to show more UI because there are simply more features. macOS these days is full of tiny things that only appear on hover that would have brought Mr Fitts or even the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines team to tears. An airplane dashboard doesn’t need to look clean, it should be useful to trained professionals. We need to swing the pendulum back.
• stainablesteel 3y ago
  reddit is the worst for this right now whenever you try to view an image in the browser it no longer allows you to go to the image link and instead redirects you to their wonky image viewer (why???) i can't scroll horizontally, i can't use the arrow keys to scroll at all, nor page up/down or home/end i can only scroll using my mouse, and if you need to scroll horizontally you have to manage to find their microscopic scroll bar that sits above an aesthetically displeasing footer to scroll sideways which is infuriating for large images and its zooming dysfunctional. on normal websites where you can view large images you can click to the location you want to zoom in, and it ballpark brings you to the right place. not reddit though. wherever you click zoom it always zooms to the top of the image and its up to you to scroll the entire image on your own
• lstamour 3y ago
  For those looking to accessibly scroll webpages: if not visually impaired, could I introduce you to the powerful combination of hitting spacebar to scroll down webpages and (in Firefox, at least) hitting the / (forward slash) key to bring up the "quick search" window? From there, you can type in whatever you want to select or bring into focus that you see on the screen. It's a great way to quickly move the focus to another part of the webpage. (If you just hit tab without quick searching first, you'll scroll back up to the last link that was in focus, but by using the / key quick search, you can basically navigate with just your keyboard and the tab key.) While this doesn't help if scrollbars are embedded in a site, if it's a traditional webpage such as the parent article, it works great :) As a result, while I do have and use a trackpad, I rarely feel like I'm missing scroll bars because I can just hit spacebar (or page down) to scroll down most times. If you need to page up or down on a Mac, it's fn key + up to go up a page, and fn + down to go down a page. Meanwhile cmd + up is like the Home key and cmd + down is the End key, so you can quickly scroll to the top or bottom of a page (or text entry box). Not to say this isn't a valid article, but there /are/ workarounds to missing visual scrollbars if you absolutely need this functionality. Admittedly, these workarounds do not work that well on mobile, where I sometimes wish the iOS Contacts app A-Z scroll helper had somehow "caught on" within webpages, to scroll them. We're missing an IDE-style control that helps us "quick scroll" and jump between headings and sections of longer webpages, that's for sure. As the article mentions, I'd be in support of minimaps, but my version of them would look a bit more like the contacts UI, small icons to represent each section that I could click on to navigate to it, and maybe if I swiped left on the right side of the screen it would show me the table of contents in full, with a search box? (Just spit-balling here, but we need more UI innovation and standardization, not less. I really don't think we've found the "perfect" UI, I think we just forget what made old UIs great when we build new UIs... And sometimes we invent greatness: see the Alfred-like Spotlight search box that you can even get on Windows via power tools that lets you quick switch to any application just by typing its name... literally genius, but not something easily available before OS X Lion.)
  • pseudalopex 3y ago
    Could I introduce you to space bar typing space or pressing a button instead? Could I introduce you to someone who uses eye tracking and voice control not having the keyboard dexterity you assumed?
• jiggawatts 3y ago
  My pet peeve is Azure Log Analytics. The query results window has a completely non-standard scrollbar setup, even compared to the rest of Azure. The default result set shows 100% useless columns, all of which have the same constant values repeated for each row. E.g.: "subcription id", "location", etc... The useful values are invariably off-to-the-right somewhere, so you have to scroll horizontally. Which you can. With a 2-pixel thick horizontal scrollbar that fades out and disappears permanently after about a second. You have to be quick, otherwise you miss your chance to see your data. It would be hilarious if it didn't cost me 50 cents each time I had to re-run a query so I can have another try at clicking the vanishing scrollbar before it's too late.
  • hotnfresh 3y ago
    All of azure’s a web UI is a disaster. Breadcrumbs that aren’t really breadcrumbs. “X” that sometimes means back and sometimes means several steps back. … and the browser back button sometimes does what you expect, and sometimes not. “X” stacked directly under one of the aforementioned “X”s, which means close, but the other “X” is back, all on a flat ui with the same background and no border. And yeah, the log analytics that feel like some alien intruder or parasite on the host UI. It’s a monument of UI insanity.
    • jiggawatts 3y ago
      I still prefer it over AWS, which has separate portals for each product in each region. All of which show random internal identifiers instead of human-readable text. None of which support a folder structure, a technology invented before the advent of computers.
      • hotnfresh 3y ago
        Every cloud “dashboard” is total shit (there are whole businesses that do nothing but provide a better UI for them, that’s how bad they are) but AWS does indeed take the prize for worst.
• theogravity 3y ago
  The irony is that this very website has scrollbar issues on my iphone 15 using mobile safari
• __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I have a lot of respect for designers. What they do is very important. I think we should all work together to help them do it better. For instance, let's rethink the API's they use. Imagine a sleek new minimal API. Now imagine it even more minimal. Keep repeating "minimalism" the word "handcuffs" comes to mind. Think how happy they'll be once we've removed all of that clutter. Let's build that API for them so they can really just design their hearts out.
  • hulitu 3y ago
    > I have a lot of respect for designers. What they do is very important. I think we should all work together to help them do it better. Of course if they pay me. Nobody helps me to do it better. I do it myself because it is my job.
• slowhadoken 3y ago
  This occurred to me the other day when I was using notepad. The scroll bar isn’t awful but it’s not great. If someone had motor control problems it would be a massive source of frustration.
• JakeAl 3y ago
  I'm getting sick of a right-click "copy" pop up appearing as I try to scroll pages these infinite scroll pages on my touchscreen, too.
• singularity2001 3y ago
  is there a way to go to the end of the Reddit or Twitter stream other than spending some long seconds manually swiping down and finding the last remembered post headline?
• zubairq 3y ago
  Interesting. I guess doom scrolling is the one constant that we all understand though
• kuratkull 3y ago
  I recently got really frustrated with Firefoxes almost invisibly thin scrollbar. Messed around in about:config and managed to make it fatter, but it made all the scrollbars inside web pages also fatter - not what I wanted at all. I'll try if only changing what was mentioned in the article helps with that. Bring back reasonably sized scrollbars, please.
  • matsemann 3y ago
    Yeah, that's also an issue: developers on Macs not realizing that other setups have visible scrollbars. So they have overflow bugs in their webpage, but they're masked by the lack of visible scroll bars to them. Other users however see a broken site. And of course blame their browser, so even more browsers/setups hide their scrollbars to not be blamed..
• m0nhawk 3y ago
  I find `overflow: scroll` is the worst (fair, it has it's uses), but I'm perplexed by seeing sites that has scrollbars on Windows when content absolutely perfectly fits on the screen. Regularly do I visit sites that's infested with scrollbars, because every second element have this set - but it looks good on macOS, right?
• mvdtnz 3y ago
  There was nothing wrong with the big wide scroll bar with the nice obvious buttons on either side. Every person involved in their removal needs to be ejected from the software world immediately without prejudice.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• presentation 3y ago
  One place where hidden scroll bars are a pain - side-scrolling large tables on webpages. It’s not obvious you there’s more data and it’s not intuitive for even technical users to randomly decide to side scroll in that scenario. Excel users are used to this since the scroll bar is always shown, but achieving a nice UX for data/table heavy web applications is not straightforward.
• whirlwin 3y ago
  What I miss with scrollbars is being able to jump to a certain spot on the page, e.g. 75% down the page.
  • shiroiuma 3y ago
    It's ironic: 20+ years ago, UI software had FAR more configurability and interesting usability settings like the one you mention here. Yet computers were FAR slower in CPU speed (and memory size too). Now, computers are infinitely faster, with far more memory to play with, yet software usability has gotten much worse, as functionality has been removed, which logically should result in simpler, faster software, but instead it's the opposite: software has all become dog-slow, even though it doesn't DO nearly as much as the software a quarter-century ago.
• albertzeyer 3y ago
  Regarding quickly scrolling around in a large document, there is also scroll wheel acceleration, i.e. the users finger scroll speed is not just a linear function mapped onto the software scroll speed but rather it can accelerate. MacOS, iOS and Android have this anyway, and a few custom software as well. I implemented a cross platform user-space variant of this, to get mouse scroll wheel acceleration. You can even use this in addition to the native scroll wheel acceleration on MacOS. https://github.com/albertz/mouse-scroll-wheel-acceleration-userspace https://github.com/albertz/mouse-scroll-wheel-acceleration-u...
• d-z-m 3y ago
  Scrollbars getting smaller was something I was noticing subconsciously, but was happening slowly enough that I was getting frog-boiled. Now they're annoying me even more than usual :^).
• kunley 3y ago
  Totally agree with what's at the very end of the article - tgat monimaps are supercool. IIRC, Sublime got them first. One of the reasons I still use it...
• sherr 3y ago
  Yes, I agree. Something that has been increasingly bothering me: how hard it is often getting to see the scrollbar, or grab it if you can find it. It's being hidden and minimised. Firefox is quite bad here, and some GTK apps. Frustrating.
• shultays 3y ago
  The scrollbars of Windows even have a right click menu with amazing features such as Scroll Here Scroll Up Page Up Top etc. I am wondering if those ever gets seen, let alone be clicked
• lloydatkinson 3y ago
  I blame macOS for popularising this
• squarefoot 3y ago
  Scrollbars are becoming indeed a problem, but what about struggling to find the right spot on a window corner/border to grab in order to resize it? Did they test how much of a hassle can be to grab a two pixel wide area on a 13" screen laptop? I can understand they need real estate to be used for actual content, but seriously how hard would be to have a small "handle" that protrudes out of the closest window corner/border when the pointer is like less than 10 pixel away from that, and disappears after say 1 second that it moved away?
  • Jenda_ 3y ago
    > struggling to find the right spot on a window corner/border to grab in order to resize it I suggest mapping <modifier>+click (e.g. Meta/Win key + left or right click) to trigger resize/move anywhere in the window.
• merelysounds 3y ago
  I wonder how that might work in a virtual environment. Scrollbars are about overflow of content for a given screen+window size; with AR/VR in a way we're working without any screen size, so this UX could take some different form. For example, Apple's TouchBar - a separate screen - in my opinion offered good scrolling UX and often with minimap support too. I'd like to see an extension of that, i.e. a large unified VR scrollbar.
  • reportgunner 3y ago
    Do you not know about virtual desktops in VR that are already available?
• SebastianKra 3y ago
  I'm imagining similar post about the removal of dedicated copy/paste buttons. "But I don't want to use the keyboard to copy" > Ok so a lot of folks have fine motor control problems That's what accessibility settings are for. These aren't an afterthought. Good interfaces are designed with them in mind. > somewhat inaccurate pointing devices like eye-trackers [...] voice/sound controlling their computer Desktop interfaces aren't a good fit for these modalities anyways, and I don't want a 1% use-case detracting from my ui. If you designed an interface from the ground up for eye-tracking, it probably also wouldn't have any scrollbars (see Apple Vision) A bigger problem are signifiers that something can be scrolled. Mostly it's self-evident that there's more content outside the viewport, but sometimes you run into edge-cases: iOS used to have some bad spots in the share sheet and Apple Music.
• jacobgorm 3y ago
  I agree the scrollbar is dying and becoming unusable. A scroll bar needs to be: - Wide, clearly visible and easy to hit. - Proportional sized, indicating how much of the document is currently in view. - Movable parts should have features indicating friction, as opposed to slippy-ness. - With arrow buttons, placed together instead of at opposing ends. - It should change colors to indicate hover and mouse press. Of the classic scrollbars shown here https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/ https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/ , the Nextstep one comes closest to having it all and the Mac OS 8 is the overall prettiest. IMHO.
  • tuoret 3y ago
    With arrow buttons, placed together instead of at opposing ends. Huh, I've never really thought about that but it does make sense to have them next to each other instead of at the opposite ends. Wonder why it's so rare to see that, apart from "it's always been this way".
    • regularfry 3y ago
      I have to assume the natural question is then "which end?" If you put them at the top and the left of vertical and horizontal bars, they're inconveniently far apart when you want to pan different dimensions. If you put them bottom and right, it's very easy to move the window so they're off the screen entirely. But then that's a problem you have with split controls anyway. It feels like there is no good choice here, and split is on average least bad.
  • regularfry 3y ago
    All of this, with the addition that you should have the option of panning in both dimensions from a single toolbar widget if the document supports it. I've seen that implemented but never with the arrow buttons together rather than at opposite ends. > - Wide, clearly visible and easy to hit. Way back in the day, there used to be a field of study called Human Computer Interaction, where people would learn about things like Fitt's Law, and the fact that the edges of the screen were particularly valuable because they effectively had infinite size. I am on OS X. For my sins, I have MS Teams open. It is hard aligned to the right of the screen. On the right edge of the window is a scroll bar. I shove my mouse to the right, I click to grab the scrollbar (which has conveniently expanded on mouse-over, and now extends to the edge pixels), and... the entire window gets dragged. I don't know how we have ended up here. There was a period when people were actively researching what made good user interfaces, and it was feeding in to end user experiences, and it showed.
• beernutz 3y ago
  For chrome and firefox there is an extension I use that helps dramatically. "Scrollbar Anywhere". The way I have it set up, I can right click and drag anywhere on "whitespace" on the page and scroll in any direction I drag the mouse. You can set it up to go as fast or slow as you like relative to the amount you move your mouse, and you can even have it "glide" when you let up on the mouse if you like. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scrollbar-anywhere/namcaplenodjnggbfkbopdbfngponici https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scrollbar-anywhere...
  • nexxer 3y ago
    Came here to say just this - it's probably the first extension I install everywhere and significantly improves usability and control. For Firefox it's this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scroll_anywhere/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scroll_anywhe...
• layer8 3y ago
  The general degradation of GUI usability over the past 10-15 years is honestly the most depressing development in computing. It’s a constant fight to keep things halfway usable, and it seems to be getting worse with each major (and sometimes minor) software update.
  • kibwen 3y ago
    > the most depressing development in computing The really depressing thing is that GUI usability regression isn't the most depressing development in modern computing. Allow me to gesture broadly at literally everything.
    • layer8 3y ago
      Yeah, I have to disagree, I wrote this deliberately. I could live much better with the other developments if at least we had intuitive, consistent, efficient, native GUIs.
• dbg31415 3y ago
  Getting rid of scroll bars was something that the guys with infinity scarves stuck us with, right around the time they started doing 200-weight fonts, and removing all the standard web components we had standardized on since the early 90s. I understand designers need freedom, but a lot of the changes in the last 10-15 years have been focused on "pretty" because the tech finally allowed things to be pretty. I hope the pendulum will start swing back towards usability. Apple's been on a mission to kill the scroll bar since 2015 or so. Others followed suit. (Here's an article from 2016 explaining how to re-enable scroll bars for all the reasons people stated in this post https://www.howtogeek.com/207749/how-to-enable-scroll-bars-in-os-x-to-improve-usability/ https://www.howtogeek.com/207749/how-to-enable-scroll-bars-i... ) Hiding scroll bars is a violation of the "Don't Make Me Think" convention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think Shame the browsers aren't bound by the same rules for the content they are designed to show. New WCAG 2.2 says: AAA Compliance "The size of the target for pointer inputs is at least 44 by 44 CSS pixels..." AA Compliance "The size of the target for pointer inputs is at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels..."
• spion 3y ago
  I have the opposite problem - I don't want to see scrollbars. I have the touchpad and scrollwheel for that. I don't need anything taking away space from actual content, especially in narrow sidebar menus. A semi-transparent strip visible only while scrolling sounds perfectly fine. Unfortunately, as the author notes, its not always easy to get this customized.
• prmoustache 3y ago
  Imho scroolbars are unneeded on computers with properly made keyboards. People are desperate to use scrollbars only when the PgUp, PgDown, Home and End keys are not quick to reach. This is the real battle to fight for. Vote with your money and stop buying computers with stupid keyboards.
  • Dalewyn 3y ago
    Scroll bars are a visual indication of how much content there is off screen/window and where I am in it. There are more uses to it than just dragging or clicking it with the mouse.
    • prmoustache 3y ago
      But you don't need a huge one for that.
  • viridian 3y ago
    I can count the amount of non technical people I have met who use the navigation keys, on a single hand, and every single one of them has a finance related job. Even most devs, particularly younger devs, never use navigation keys.
• herbcso 3y ago
  Stop scrollbar hate! Bring back the scrollbar! MSBGA! (doesn't have quite the same ring, guess we'll need to workshop that ;] ).
• tibbydudeza 3y ago
  Chat GPT Web interface and the shitty way to navigate their answers - no scrollbars For all that money they raised - it is a shitty interface.
• neycoda 3y ago
  Ah, reading the article, scrollbars are not becoming a problem, their shrinking width is or the lack of them are. See, the difference matters, because the reason this is happening is people think scrollbars are a problem to even exist.
• djha-skin 3y ago
  Side tangent but here goes. > Naturally the script has to override flatpak separately because heaven forbid my flatpak applications look the way I themed my system. Triggered. There's a bug currently where you have to set QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR on QT apps for Hidpi. Trying to get it set on flatpak apps though is an absolute nightmare, so all my flatpak apps are really small on my screen.
• sacredSatan 3y ago
  I hate that MacOS hides scrollbars by default. First thing I do when I setup a MacBook is to set it to always show scrollbars.
• hombre_fatal 3y ago
  This article made me realize I can never even see the scroll position in Safari, especially on a dark page like that one. And I've gotten used to never seeing it. I don't even look anymore. Safari's scrollbar on that page is white on white. ???
  • saagarjha 3y ago
    I filed a Radar for this years ago, rdar://problem/46773896. Doubt anyone looked at it. I am confused how nobody seems to have also ran into this considering the WebKit homepage demonstrates this quite well.
• cabirum 3y ago
  Umm, scrollbars nowadays are just to indicate something is scrollable. You almost never have to actually drag them. Touch devices: swipe the content. Laptops: touchpad two-finger swipe, hold middle button and use trackpoint Desktops: mouse scroll wheel, pg-up/dn What am I missing?
  • oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    > Umm, scrollbars nowadays are just to indicate something is scrollable. Which makes the often-default behaviour to autohide them all the more ridiculous! > Touch devices: swipe the content. Agreed; scrolling is one of the things that touch input just beats everything else at hands down. > Laptops... Desktops... Those still lack the 'click to move instantly to given point in document' functionality, right?
    • cabirum 3y ago
      Scrollbars were never meant to jump instantly anywhere. They are intended for progressive movement in either direction. It's a much more recent feature implemented as "minimap" in several IDEs. The difference is that minimap actually renders preview of the content to jump to, so you don't jump blind. Add: autohide is there because oftentimes it is obvious content can be scrolled by observing it does not fit entirely in the viewbox.
      • oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
        It's quite possible to have the best of both worlds, with arrow icons for progressive movement and clicking the bar to jump instantly.
    • NekkoDroid 3y ago
      not just that, but for example my mousewheels sensor is basically unusable (when I scroll either direction its just roulette if it wants to scroll up or down or a mix of both) so I often use the middle mouse click to scroll... ends up not a lot of applications other than browser based ones support this.
• pdpi 3y ago
  > The simple fact that these skinny scroll bars exist are evidence that designers do not sit with non technical users to conduct usability testing. This kind of hits one of the superficial symptoms of the problem, but I think it’s a much more fundamental problem than this. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the type of programmer who’s incredibly productive and cranks out features like nobody’s business, but has little knowledge of, and even less respect for, computer science fundamentals. Short term these are great for getting an MVP out the door, but they become a liability when you need to scale. When stakeholders see their short-term productivity and miss the long term implications of their work, you breed a very particular technical culture. The UX design world has the exact same problem. Designers who come from a pure graphics design background and no experience with, or respect for, decades of HCI research. They produce beautiful, slick designs that dazzle their stakeholders, while not accounting for the actual interactive component of their work. Or, in short — the same attitude that leads to developers saying “premature optimisation is the root of all evil” in response to any performance concerns is what causes designers to produce this sort of work.
• grey_earthling 3y ago
  In GNOME you can switch off overlay scrollbars in Settings > Accessibility > Seeing.
• CoryAlexMartin 3y ago
  It’s very funny and strange that one of the defining characteristics of modern GUI design is that everything is very large. Lots of whitespace, buttons twice as tall as the cursor, windows that have to be maximized in order to see more than seven lines of content, and yet the scrollbars are the size of a toothpick.
  • jamincan 3y ago
    I suspect both of those trends are related to designing mobile-first.
    • demoklion 3y ago
      Common misconception. This would be so called mobile only as opposed to mobile first, which fits data to increasingly larger viewports.
  • hulitu 3y ago
    everything that doesn't count is very large. Things that count are small. I always have to scale Windows to 150% or 125 % because of that.
  • zo1 3y ago
    And the entire content area for some no-longer-relevant reason is maxed at 1000px. It's like the designers got stuck with bootstrap from 2014 and can't seem to get unstuck.
• CRConrad 3y ago
  Bad headline: > But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. So it's not the scrollbars per se, but the fucking around with them that is the problem. A) Wow, noticed that already? /s B) Why just scrollbars? Fucking "front-end" designers are fucking around with everything! C) I blame https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37868493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37868493
• wiz21c 3y ago
  In europe, designing applications also for people who have motor control difficulties is not a matter of taste, it's an obligation. https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202 https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202 Just respect the law for all of them (potentially you at some point in your life).
• ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  On one hand, no scrollbars, so when you're scrolling, you have no idea how far 'down' you are... on the other, 80% of the screen is filled with useless junk, ads, sidebars, app menu bars, search bars, address bars, status bars, side panels... but not enough space for a scrollbar.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• alexvitkov 3y ago
  While we're at it, if there is a scrollbar and i click the middle, I want to go to the middle of thr content, not move up or down one page closer to the middle.
• lnxg33k1 3y ago
  I think too many people with OCD are getting into tech, I’d have nothing against them if they realised they have an issue and would not destroy everything around them, like remove bad looking but essential for usability elements or having to align vertically everything making it a challenge to understand what line is what, that said, I curse you guys, unless you get help or get out of usability/ coding
  • CarlsonTucker 3y ago
    that isn't OCD
    • steve1977 3y ago
      It's probably more ADHD if anything. Doing something for doing's sake. A person with actual OCD could probably make a good UX designer.
• indymike 3y ago
  Scroll bars have been a problem two ways: 1. Out of context bare-ui style scroll bars in web textareas and mis-sized iframes in most web browsers. 2. Lack of screen real estate on early, lower resolution mobile devices left designers looking for something better. On the web design front, scrollbars have been customizable via JS and CSS for some time now. On the mobile front, swiping is fun, but it's really nice when you can just tap about where you want to be in whatever you are viewing.
• michaelteter 3y ago
  I know it feels clunky (perhaps) aesthetically to have thick scroll bars and thick sliding dividers and thick window borders, but I would choose ergnomics over prettiness. Even as a normal human with good motor control, good equipment, and decent eyesight, I routinely encounter situations (macOS) where I have to carefully move the pointer back and forth across a region where I know the "line" (divider, border) is so I get the opportunity to move something. Another related problem is the overloading of the title bar. In the past, the title bar was always there for each window. Grabbing and moving a window was very easy. Now, many apps try to move menus and other controls into that space, leaving the user to find the few pixels here or there which can be grabbed to move the window (rather than taking some action within the app). Some apps allow you to revert to normal title bar (thank you Firefox), but some don't. And true, you gain some valuable screen space from what would normally be a wasted big area of title bar, but the tradeoff sucks when you need to move something.
  • baloki 3y ago
    First thing I do on MacOS is turn on always show scrollbars tbh.
• krunck 3y ago
  An don't get me started on nested scrollable areas...
• butz 3y ago
  Looking from web browser perspective, scrollbar should be part of browser UI ("chrome" if you will), but not webpage. Sure, some designers love that they can customize colors of scrollbar and change its width, but it's a huge accessibility problem, even for people without disabilities. And when clicking on scrollbar counts as interaction with website and starts autoplaying video somewhere in the background, you know that someone messed up. With screens getting wider, scrollbars width should increase proportionally.
  • docmars 3y ago
    I agree mostly; one of the tricky areas is pages with split layout containers that are individually scrollable, where it doesn't make sense to use the page/body level scrollbar to control that content. Another common case are smaller widgets or modules that have their own scrolling context. The other half of the issue is that native scrollbars, especially on Windows, are a huge eyesore in those scenarios because they disrupt the layout or conflict heavily with the app or site's branding in some way. Take any eyesore in real life and it produces the same psychological effect — scrollbars too often feel like they don't belong. Of course, many here (and myself) would argue that usability is far more important than branding. I think a happy medium would be to enforce a certain size and stay with fundamental usability principles, while allowing customization of colors / arrow images at most, probably. A good, usability-focused designer alongside their engineers would keep these things in mind, ideally, but alas — a great many experiences are driven by amateur-level professionals who are still learning about these blind spots, and favor aesthetics over functionality.
• nomdep 3y ago
  I read tons of people complaining about GNOME, why on earth you are still using it instead of KDE?
• rogerallen 3y ago
  Twenty-year-olds should not be in charge of UX.
• xnx 3y ago
  Bad scrollbars (and other UI elements) are all symptoms of the origin of the web as a document/form platform and subsequent attempts to use it for interactive apps. This has has popularized some really useful paradigms in applications (back buttons, breadcrumbs), but the lack of capable standardized controls has been painful. I'm hopeful we'll eventually claw our way out of these dark ages, but there's a lot of maturing that needs to happen in web UI designers for that to happen. It's not a lack of skill on their part, but rather a lack of taste. They simply don't know how responsive and useful an interface could be because they've grown up on shitty interfaces.
• hoosieree 3y ago
  Maybe scrolling itself is the real problem, and bad scrollbar design is just a symptom. Think of how long it took you to get to this comment, and all the other things you could have been doing with your life. Was it worth it?
• itslennysfault 3y ago
  Not sure why anyone wants scrollbars. On Mac they're pretty much universally hidden until you start scrolling. I never use them and hardly notice them which is great. I only scroll with 2 fingers on the track pad. I'm always shocked when I see people interact with a scroll bar directly using the mouse.
• aidenn0 3y ago
  I hate most auto-hide scrollbars. Something I didn't see mentioned in TFA was the fact that I mostly use scrollbars as a read-only tool; sure they are good for the occasional scrubbing through content, but mostly I scroll with the keyboard or scroll-wheel. Glancing to the side and seeing both how much scrolling there is (by the size of the scrollbar grab target[1]) and how much space I have to go (by the position of the scrollbar grab target is something I use all the freaking time. 1: This is a relatively modern feature. The first decade or so of me using scrollbars they were a fixed size)
• WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  * Thankfully, Firefox is at least fixable (for now…), Here, I set the size to 50. I don’t want it this big myself but by goly am I glad I can make it this big anyway.* Only 50? I can finally have something useful to fill that massive blank space between my content and the edge of the page.
• fifticon 3y ago
  the current state of scrollbars is a civilization lowpoint. We have lost our way since the year 2000. Too many crayons are eaten :-/
• dasl 3y ago
  gmail iOS app has no scrollbars. pretty annoying.
• robotburrito 3y ago
  It's definitely somewhat annoying when they don't exist. For example I had to build a relatively simple feature that required a user scroll down, and its not completely obvious sometimes that you should do so due to the lack of scroll bars. So I had to force them on.
• bhauer 3y ago
  In Firefox, I also add the following to userChrome.css to make the scroll thumb high-contrast versus the scroll bar itself. The default Firefox colors are, in my opinion, too low-contrast. :root { scrollbar-color: rgb(35,75,240) rgb(220,222,224) !important; } The first color is for the thumb (the part you pick up and drag) and the second color is for the remainder of the scrollbar. Resulting appearance: https://imgur.com/a/A1LTS4M https://imgur.com/a/A1LTS4M
• karaterobot 3y ago
  > They’ve also started hiding the scrollbar entirely by default until you hover over where it’s supposed to be, what is that???? What it is is a UI improvement for me, and I think for most other people. I agree that you should be able to override scrollbar behavior and styling. That should be a supported accessibility option.
• vinceguidry 3y ago
  Looking at you, Spotify, with your scroll area so close to the track actions hamburger. God you make managing a playlist such a chore. HMU if you want ideas bruh. I gotz em.
• ilyt 3y ago
  >My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. <citation needed>
• BrandoElFollito 3y ago
  In addition to all the crap already mentioned, I would add the scrollbars of vscode which are horrendous. I never know where I am, where the "holder" of the scrollbar is and where I can scroll. This is a real nightmare.
• expazl 3y ago
  > Ok so a lot of folks have fine motor control problems. The scrollbar is not there so you can use it to change your scroll position. It's there solely for the purpose of visualizing what your current scroll position is. Every device and every application should have a way to scroll that does not rely on the assumption that people will hunt out some narrow area of their screen and hold it while dragging to scroll. That's just a horrible interaction that never should have been considered in any setting. At least that's my opinion.
  • deepspace 3y ago
    I am going to disagree strongly there. The alternative way to scroll is, in most cases, the mouse scroll wheel. And that gets tedious (and strenuous for some people) really fast when the document gets large. I absolutely need the ability to use the scroll bar to change my position in a document.
    • pohuing 3y ago
      One Alternative would be autoscroll. Ie clicking with the middle mouse button and then moving the mouse up or down. The distance and direction between the click position and the cursor controls the scroll speed. But it feels like this is primarily a windows thing for some reason. Firefox supports it cross platform but that's about it
      • pseudalopex 3y ago
        Many people have trouble controlling the speed. And most Apple mice didn't have a middle button.
    • joseda-hg 3y ago
      I can't remember the last time I had to resort to manually scrolling by clicking the scrollbar In order of use, I scroll one click, middle-click and drag (Best for constant movement), use the dedicated keys, use arrows, or use vimium bindings (Which I try to avoid, because I'd prefer to not get used to non-CUA keybindings on programs I might have to use in other computers)
• nsonha 3y ago
  > The Best I can imagine minimaps being useful on graphical content but the author gave the example of it being used dogmatically and unhelpful: code editor. There is nothing to see in "the shape of the code"? The minimap could (and I usually set this the first thing in vscode) be replaced with actual useful markers like svc changes
• alphadocs 3y ago
  Please discuss scrollbars issues while using slakc, Its getting tough to scroll upwards for more chats in history on slak, due to clunky behaviour of scrolls.
  • alphadocs 3y ago
    Its Slack, any update on its scroll bar issues?
• flohofwoe 3y ago
  Even though I hardly use scroll bars by grabbing them with the mouse cursor, I still want them around as visual hint what part of the page is currently shown (first thing I do on a new Mac is to enable scrollbars to be always visible). In general, user interface shouldn't be designed against an "average user" because there is no such thing in the first place (for instance see: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages/article_e3231734-e5da-5bf5-9496-a34e52d60bd9.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...). Let us configure this shit.
• theyAreThem11 3y ago
  [flagged]
• eviks 3y ago
  > My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. My friend, a happy scroll-wheeler, you can also use your keyboard! > they don’t wanna say “scroll down” over and over again or start auto scrolling and try to land in the right spot. sure, they should be able to say "scroll down to 40%" and land around where they think the right spot is (although completely agree that having no user configurability is a common UI crime, and also think minimaps are better) > Buttons were not dependent on this. ... I don’t use these! yes, because they are an abomination - a tiny precision UI element to perform a function that's much easier to accomplish with better keybind