4 ms·

Scrollbar style is the 4th wall? How arbitrary can you get?

sergiotapia 12y ago
The scroll bar is (or should be!) OS-controlled. Why give people the opportunity to muck up the scroll bar and add their crazy ideas. The browser belongs to the user, not the website.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  Yes, those crazy ideas, like styling buttons and text areas. I'm sorry, I can't take this sort of complaint seriously...
  - thristian 12y ago
    Any kind of power, including the ability to style buttons, text-areas or scroll-bars, can be abused. There's always some people that (quite reasonably) feel that widespread abuse of that power justifies withdrawing it, and some people that (quite reasonably) feel that the few really good uses outweigh the potential for abuse.
    - scrollaway 12y ago
      And what, exactly, is going to happen if people "abuse" scrollbar styling? Or button styling? Are we here to fight lame design fads by preventing people from building cool apps?
      - thristian 12y ago
        When I come to a website, it's usually because I want some particular piece of information (like movie times or ticket prices) or to have some particular interaction (to find new, interesting stories or to play a game). Good design (and good designers) keep that goal in mind, and support it by keeping distracting elements (possibly including weird, mis-styled scrollbars!) to a minimum, allowing me to focus. Less-good designers just aim for making something more-or-less cohesive, and bad designers rarely aim higher than "something cool" whether or not it supports my goal. Mediocre and bad design hinders me from achieving my goal by hiding or obscuring basic tools of interaction like buttons or scroll-bars. Even good design can be a problem, if my goals do not align with what the designer had in mind (for example, the designer wants to make a good impression for first-time customers, but I'm trying to file a customer-support ticket). I appreciate that many of the people commenting on that ticket are just trying to make the world a more pleasant place, but some times I wish browsers had a button that would blast away all the custom styling of a page and just display the content in a standardised fashion (like the Reader mode many browsers have, but not just limited to long-form articles).
        Drdrdrq 12y ago
        If you want such a button, search for bookmarlets. I usually install one that makes all fonts the same (large) size and one that forces all texts to B/W. Can't live without it.
- seanp2k2 12y ago
  I agree, and I personally really hate it when websites provide their own scrolling mechanism, as it usually doesn't support two-finger (mouse wheel) scroll, doesn't have acceleration, doesn't have my OS scroll speed, etc. IMO overriding scroll bars on your site / app is almost always a bad idea, as it leads to poor UX / usability. Edit: I'd also extend my opinion to cover things like a strip of items which must be scrolled through using other UI elements (e.g. Arrows or bubbles). While cute (maybe), this only allows uses to scroll at the one speed you give them. Just put it in a horizontal scroll or better yet, do something completely different.
  - wtallis 12y ago
    I think this may be a proposal to allow for scrollers that behave natively but are visually unrecognizable as such. While in theory that may allow for the worst offenders to rein things in a bit, I suspect it will more likely be taken as an invitation for people to make their sites less usable and accessible.
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    I absolutely agree that reimplementing scrolling logic is absolutely awful. It's an accessibility nightmare. But scrollbar styling is very different to scrolling logic. We're not talking about stealing people's mousewheels here, we're talking about changing scrollbar themes. This is important for apps which want native scrolling logic inside their app but want their app to look native. The only alternative, in fact, is to reimplement scrolling logic inside the app. Performance suffers, accessibility suffers, everyone loses.
    - userbinator 12y ago
      but want their app to look native. Shouldn't you not be attempting to modify the appearance of the scrollbars and letting them be the style the OS chooses, if you want them to look "native"? These developers seem to be wanting scrollbar styling so they can make scrollbars look different from their native appearance. There are also quite a few truly native apps which have reinvented scrollbars instead of using the OS', and they are awkward to use because they don't behave exactly like native ones do.
- macspoofing 12y ago
  I'm not clear why it's good that you can style every other UI component except this one.
  - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
    First off, because it isn't. There are a number of things that personally shouldn't be styled. Or rather, there are a number of things that should have their styles overridable without breaking things. There are an astounding number of things I've seen abused, badly. I mean - look at the number of websites that aren't usable without a web font because they embedded all of their icons in it. Bonus points if they load the web font via JS. Bonus points if it's third-party JS. Secondly, you cannot style every other UI component except this one. The browser chrome. The mouse pointer. The context menu (to an extent, depending on browser). The thing with scrollbars is that they are at the boundary between the website and the browser. There are pros and cons - allowing "good" websites to apply "good" styles, but not for inane UIs. Personally, I think that the better approach would be for the browser to color the scrollbar dependent on the background color of the page.

The scroll bar is (or should be!) OS-controlled. Why give people the opportunity to muck up the scroll bar and add their crazy ideas. The browser belongs to the user, not the website.

scrollaway 12y ago
Yes, those crazy ideas, like styling buttons and text areas. I'm sorry, I can't take this sort of complaint seriously...
- thristian 12y ago
  Any kind of power, including the ability to style buttons, text-areas or scroll-bars, can be abused. There's always some people that (quite reasonably) feel that widespread abuse of that power justifies withdrawing it, and some people that (quite reasonably) feel that the few really good uses outweigh the potential for abuse.
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    And what, exactly, is going to happen if people "abuse" scrollbar styling? Or button styling? Are we here to fight lame design fads by preventing people from building cool apps?
    - thristian 12y ago
      When I come to a website, it's usually because I want some particular piece of information (like movie times or ticket prices) or to have some particular interaction (to find new, interesting stories or to play a game). Good design (and good designers) keep that goal in mind, and support it by keeping distracting elements (possibly including weird, mis-styled scrollbars!) to a minimum, allowing me to focus. Less-good designers just aim for making something more-or-less cohesive, and bad designers rarely aim higher than "something cool" whether or not it supports my goal. Mediocre and bad design hinders me from achieving my goal by hiding or obscuring basic tools of interaction like buttons or scroll-bars. Even good design can be a problem, if my goals do not align with what the designer had in mind (for example, the designer wants to make a good impression for first-time customers, but I'm trying to file a customer-support ticket). I appreciate that many of the people commenting on that ticket are just trying to make the world a more pleasant place, but some times I wish browsers had a button that would blast away all the custom styling of a page and just display the content in a standardised fashion (like the Reader mode many browsers have, but not just limited to long-form articles).
      - Drdrdrq 12y ago
        If you want such a button, search for bookmarlets. I usually install one that makes all fonts the same (large) size and one that forces all texts to B/W. Can't live without it.
seanp2k2 12y ago
I agree, and I personally really hate it when websites provide their own scrolling mechanism, as it usually doesn't support two-finger (mouse wheel) scroll, doesn't have acceleration, doesn't have my OS scroll speed, etc. IMO overriding scroll bars on your site / app is almost always a bad idea, as it leads to poor UX / usability. Edit: I'd also extend my opinion to cover things like a strip of items which must be scrolled through using other UI elements (e.g. Arrows or bubbles). While cute (maybe), this only allows uses to scroll at the one speed you give them. Just put it in a horizontal scroll or better yet, do something completely different.
- wtallis 12y ago
  I think this may be a proposal to allow for scrollers that behave natively but are visually unrecognizable as such. While in theory that may allow for the worst offenders to rein things in a bit, I suspect it will more likely be taken as an invitation for people to make their sites less usable and accessible.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  I absolutely agree that reimplementing scrolling logic is absolutely awful. It's an accessibility nightmare. But scrollbar styling is very different to scrolling logic. We're not talking about stealing people's mousewheels here, we're talking about changing scrollbar themes. This is important for apps which want native scrolling logic inside their app but want their app to look native. The only alternative, in fact, is to reimplement scrolling logic inside the app. Performance suffers, accessibility suffers, everyone loses.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    but want their app to look native. Shouldn't you not be attempting to modify the appearance of the scrollbars and letting them be the style the OS chooses, if you want them to look "native"? These developers seem to be wanting scrollbar styling so they can make scrollbars look different from their native appearance. There are also quite a few truly native apps which have reinvented scrollbars instead of using the OS', and they are awkward to use because they don't behave exactly like native ones do.
macspoofing 12y ago
I'm not clear why it's good that you can style every other UI component except this one.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
  First off, because it isn't. There are a number of things that personally shouldn't be styled. Or rather, there are a number of things that should have their styles overridable without breaking things. There are an astounding number of things I've seen abused, badly. I mean - look at the number of websites that aren't usable without a web font because they embedded all of their icons in it. Bonus points if they load the web font via JS. Bonus points if it's third-party JS. Secondly, you cannot style every other UI component except this one. The browser chrome. The mouse pointer. The context menu (to an extent, depending on browser). The thing with scrollbars is that they are at the boundary between the website and the browser. There are pros and cons - allowing "good" websites to apply "good" styles, but not for inane UIs. Personally, I think that the better approach would be for the browser to color the scrollbar dependent on the background color of the page.