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The action of clicking the scrollbar is more of an edge case than a significant design cornerstone these days. Most people are going to be scrolling with a mous

The action of clicking the scrollbar is more of an edge case than a significant design cornerstone these days. Most people are going to be scrolling with a mouse wheel, or a two finger swipe on their touchpad, etc. Clicking and dragging a control is slower, and a fundamentally bad experience in the first place. The only practical purpose of the scrollbar in modern design is to serve as a visual indicator that an area can be scrolled, and to show location and scale. If you have a reasonably complicated web app there is a good chance you are going to need a scrolling view inside your page. You still need a scrollbar to show that the area can be scrolled, but using the default control styling looks really ugly.

regularfry 12y ago
> Most people Really? Have you got any numbers for this, or are you actually saying "this is how I use it, and I presume most people are like me"? Because what you're saying simply isn't true for me. When I'm reading a long block of content, I'll often click the scroll thumb and keep it clicked, using either the mouse or trackpad (or trackball, for that matter) to seek proportionally through the page. You don't get that proportionality of motion with either the mouse wheel or the two-finger trackpad gestures which mimic it. The "most people" argument you're making is what leads to broken ideas like infinite scrolling, which appeals to one subset of the population who assume that everyone else uses their UI in precisely the same way that they do.
- NathanKP 12y ago
  So given that you like to use the scrollbar in that matter which would you rather see: 1) A native scrollbar that is restyled to match the colors of the webpage it is in? 2) A janky web view with scrollbars hidden and then reimplemented in JS which doesn't function they way you want it to? Like it or not designers usually don't spend time on the subset of the audience that clicks and drags the scrollbar. They spend time drawing a pretty looking scrollbar. When it comes to the implementation personally I think it still better to have a scrollbar that functions the way you expect it to, even if it looks a little different, rather than ending up with many different reimplementations of the scrollbar by different programmers.
  - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
    3) Overriding the removal of the default scrollbar so I can actually use a scrollbar that works.
  - regularfry 12y ago
    Of the two, 1) is the less bad option. This seems obvious to me. It is wrong to treat the scroll bar as only visual element and not an input element; that's what I take issue with. > Like it or not designers usually don't spend time on the subset of the audience that clicks and drags the scrollbar. They spend time drawing a pretty looking scrollbar. If the designers in question, who are working on a user interface element, don't consider how users will interface with it, it's fair to criticise them for not doing their jobs.
DanBC 12y ago
> edge case A large chunk of those edge cases are people with disabilities. I have colleagues with a variety of learning disabilities. They strongly reject the label "disability". "Dan, when someone gives me a document that I can't understand, and I tell them that I can't understand it, they often say 'well, of course you dont understand it, you are learnig disabled'. So what they're doing is transferring the blame for the lack of understanding from them to me. It's somehow my problem that I don't understand this document. But here's the thing: it's not my job to understand that document. I don't get paid to understand that document. It is their job to provide information in a meaningful accessible way, and they've failed. In this country they might even have a legal duty to make the information accessible. Or they might be paid from public funds to make the information accessible. I'm not disabled unless you chose to disable me." This strong challenge echoes what some people with physical disabilities say: "my wheelchair is not the problem. You putting a step in front of your shop is the problem; you holding meetings in inaccessible buildings is the problem." This kind of styling makes things slower, harder to use, more expensive to build and maintain. Just worse overall. The web would be a better place if people stopped doing it.

regularfry 12y ago

> Most people Really? Have you got any numbers for this, or are you actually saying "this is how I use it, and I presume most people are like me"? Because what you're saying simply isn't true for me. When I'm reading a long block of content, I'll often click the scroll thumb and keep it clicked, using either the mouse or trackpad (or trackball, for that matter) to seek proportionally through the page. You don't get that proportionality of motion with either the mouse wheel or the two-finger trackpad gestures which mimic it. The "most people" argument you're making is what leads to broken ideas like infinite scrolling, which appeals to one subset of the population who assume that everyone else uses their UI in precisely the same way that they do.

NathanKP 12y ago
So given that you like to use the scrollbar in that matter which would you rather see: 1) A native scrollbar that is restyled to match the colors of the webpage it is in? 2) A janky web view with scrollbars hidden and then reimplemented in JS which doesn't function they way you want it to? Like it or not designers usually don't spend time on the subset of the audience that clicks and drags the scrollbar. They spend time drawing a pretty looking scrollbar. When it comes to the implementation personally I think it still better to have a scrollbar that functions the way you expect it to, even if it looks a little different, rather than ending up with many different reimplementations of the scrollbar by different programmers.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
  3) Overriding the removal of the default scrollbar so I can actually use a scrollbar that works.
- regularfry 12y ago
  Of the two, 1) is the less bad option. This seems obvious to me. It is wrong to treat the scroll bar as only visual element and not an input element; that's what I take issue with. > Like it or not designers usually don't spend time on the subset of the audience that clicks and drags the scrollbar. They spend time drawing a pretty looking scrollbar. If the designers in question, who are working on a user interface element, don't consider how users will interface with it, it's fair to criticise them for not doing their jobs.

DanBC 12y ago

> edge case A large chunk of those edge cases are people with disabilities. I have colleagues with a variety of learning disabilities. They strongly reject the label "disability". "Dan, when someone gives me a document that I can't understand, and I tell them that I can't understand it, they often say 'well, of course you dont understand it, you are learnig disabled'. So what they're doing is transferring the blame for the lack of understanding from them to me. It's somehow my problem that I don't understand this document. But here's the thing: it's not my job to understand that document. I don't get paid to understand that document. It is their job to provide information in a meaningful accessible way, and they've failed. In this country they might even have a legal duty to make the information accessible. Or they might be paid from public funds to make the information accessible. I'm not disabled unless you chose to disable me." This strong challenge echoes what some people with physical disabilities say: "my wheelchair is not the problem. You putting a step in front of your shop is the problem; you holding meetings in inaccessible buildings is the problem." This kind of styling makes things slower, harder to use, more expensive to build and maintain. Just worse overall. The web would be a better place if people stopped doing it.