4 ms·

Stylable scroll bars are definitely a slippery slope. Once you allow it, you are possibly opening the gate for really bad scroll bars that pervert an essential

by Narretz 11y ago

Stylable scroll bars are definitely a slippery slope. Once you allow it, you are possibly opening the gate for really bad scroll bars that pervert an essential ui of browsers. On the other hand, lots of people demand custom scroll bars, which leads to shitty scroll experiences because every js implementation is bound to perform badly in one scenario ot another.

Zekio 11y ago
there will always be bad scroll bars or confusing websites, people will just stop using those sites, but that shouldn't prevent people who make a nice scroll bar from doing so.
- nfoz 11y ago
  People don't have much choice over what websites they access. People rely on websites, and basically every webpage provides different utility, so we're all stuck with what the designer published. Very many designers are bad, due in large part to the complexity of the web.
  - Zekio 11y ago
    True, but most browsers beside IE already support this, and people should be getting used to different kinds of scroll bars, from various apps to programs which doesn't use the system scroll bar.
    - nfoz 11y ago
      Why should people be getting used to different UIs for different things? Why shouldn't we consolidate, so that there is a single consistent UI? It's not very easy, for example, for the elderly, and persons with some types of disability, to get used to things changing all the time, and having a different mental context for the controls of one site/application vs another.
      - Zekio 11y ago
        There isn't even a Consistent UI as it is, System Scroll Bar is not a consistent thing, it changes by OS, or theme of OS if you are into that sort of thing.
        ForHackernews 11y ago
        But users choose their own OS/themes, or at a minimum they get used to one particular one that was chosen for them. I think computer people really underestimate how much the average user values consistency and predictability, and how much they hate change. There's no other tool we ask humans to use that looks and acts completely differently every 2-5 years. Edit: Actually, on thinking about this, computer people also value consistency: How would you like it if all your vim keybindings were changed? They just don't extend that courtesy to their users.
nfoz 11y ago
So, it sounds like just a bad idea. I don't understand -- why do people think it's a good idea for web pages to style my scrollbar? I wonder if there's something of an age/cultural separation at play here. Back in the 90s when desktop environments were a point of wide discussion and interest, there was a piece of "common knowledge" that it's important for all the user's applications to have a consistent look+feel. Furthermore, that look+feel was in their control via desktop manager settings: so you could choose large font-sizes, high-contrast window borders and cursors, scrollbar widths, stuff like that. The web used to follow that same themeing, or at least tried to; hence specific UI controls were part of HTML, and the browser could defer to the platform toolkit to render them. That mechanism has been abandoned by the Web as it has moved towards a full application-platform, where every webpage re-implements its own toolkit and decides how things should look+feel. Which is directly the opposite of the "consistent-look desktop" philosophy. There are some good reasons why that happened, but I think a whole lot of bad ones too. Taking the user's scrollbar out of their control, into the webpage designer's, is just another UI control ripe for abuse. I guess the only question is that, since webpages render their own controls for everything else, shouldn't they be able to make the Firefox scrollbar consistent with the rest of it? But then, why is the Firefox scrollbar coming into play at all, when they could already just implement their own as a Javascript control?
- Zekio 11y ago
  sometimes the System scrollbar feel very wide and big if you have a slim container that have a scrollbar. Or it can steal focus from the content it self, if your website is a darkly colored one and you have massive light grey scrollbar in middle of the site.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Sometimes the scrollbar is big and wide for a reason. I recently was asked to find out the registry settings on Windows CE to make all scrollbars forty pixels wide so they could be used effectively on a cheap resistive touchscreen.
- mozumder 11y ago
  The user should never be given control. Users are terrible at determining their own experience. A good designer knows what the user wants better than the user. Of course, there are bad designers, but they get filtered out by users not going back to their site. In the end, the designer should have control over every pixel on his product. Any OS branding should disappear from view, because the web advances faster than OS UI design. Also, this problem was the same back in the 90's. There was the default terrible OS user interface, and some apps decided to make their own much nicer interface. Kai Power Tools immediately comes to mind, as well as any game with their own UI.

by Narretz 11y ago

Zekio 11y ago

there will always be bad scroll bars or confusing websites, people will just stop using those sites, but that shouldn't prevent people who make a nice scroll bar from doing so.

nfoz 11y ago
People don't have much choice over what websites they access. People rely on websites, and basically every webpage provides different utility, so we're all stuck with what the designer published. Very many designers are bad, due in large part to the complexity of the web.
- Zekio 11y ago
  True, but most browsers beside IE already support this, and people should be getting used to different kinds of scroll bars, from various apps to programs which doesn't use the system scroll bar.
  - nfoz 11y ago
    Why should people be getting used to different UIs for different things? Why shouldn't we consolidate, so that there is a single consistent UI? It's not very easy, for example, for the elderly, and persons with some types of disability, to get used to things changing all the time, and having a different mental context for the controls of one site/application vs another.
    - Zekio 11y ago
      There isn't even a Consistent UI as it is, System Scroll Bar is not a consistent thing, it changes by OS, or theme of OS if you are into that sort of thing.
      - ForHackernews 11y ago
        But users choose their own OS/themes, or at a minimum they get used to one particular one that was chosen for them. I think computer people really underestimate how much the average user values consistency and predictability, and how much they hate change. There's no other tool we ask humans to use that looks and acts completely differently every 2-5 years. Edit: Actually, on thinking about this, computer people also value consistency: How would you like it if all your vim keybindings were changed? They just don't extend that courtesy to their users.

nfoz 11y ago

So, it sounds like just a bad idea. I don't understand -- why do people think it's a good idea for web pages to style my scrollbar? I wonder if there's something of an age/cultural separation at play here. Back in the 90s when desktop environments were a point of wide discussion and interest, there was a piece of "common knowledge" that it's important for all the user's applications to have a consistent look+feel. Furthermore, that look+feel was in their control via desktop manager settings: so you could choose large font-sizes, high-contrast window borders and cursors, scrollbar widths, stuff like that. The web used to follow that same themeing, or at least tried to; hence specific UI controls were part of HTML, and the browser could defer to the platform toolkit to render them. That mechanism has been abandoned by the Web as it has moved towards a full application-platform, where every webpage re-implements its own toolkit and decides how things should look+feel. Which is directly the opposite of the "consistent-look desktop" philosophy. There are some good reasons why that happened, but I think a whole lot of bad ones too. Taking the user's scrollbar out of their control, into the webpage designer's, is just another UI control ripe for abuse. I guess the only question is that, since webpages render their own controls for everything else, shouldn't they be able to make the Firefox scrollbar consistent with the rest of it? But then, why is the Firefox scrollbar coming into play at all, when they could already just implement their own as a Javascript control?

Zekio 11y ago
sometimes the System scrollbar feel very wide and big if you have a slim container that have a scrollbar. Or it can steal focus from the content it self, if your website is a darkly colored one and you have massive light grey scrollbar in middle of the site.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Sometimes the scrollbar is big and wide for a reason. I recently was asked to find out the registry settings on Windows CE to make all scrollbars forty pixels wide so they could be used effectively on a cheap resistive touchscreen.
mozumder 11y ago
The user should never be given control. Users are terrible at determining their own experience. A good designer knows what the user wants better than the user. Of course, there are bad designers, but they get filtered out by users not going back to their site. In the end, the designer should have control over every pixel on his product. Any OS branding should disappear from view, because the web advances faster than OS UI design. Also, this problem was the same back in the 90's. There was the default terrible OS user interface, and some apps decided to make their own much nicer interface. Kai Power Tools immediately comes to mind, as well as any game with their own UI.