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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 someth

by 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.
- nfoz 11y ago
  > The user should never be given control. > the designer should have control over every pixel on his product. That's why I can't increase the font sizes or zoom in on mobile browsing, to aid my poor eyesight. Sigh. Why should USERS never have control, but you give bad designers a free pass? That's an awfully totalitarian view of computing, and leads to many unbearable situations. > Of course, there are bad designers, but they get filtered out by users not going back to their site. No. As I mentioned in another comment, you can't just pick-and-choose websites like equivalent oranges. Each website is different, and while occasionally you can choose which blog you read, you can't so easily select which government agency you need to engage with. We all have to deal with the designer's choices, good or bad. A tangent, but back to this: > the designer should have control over every pixel on his product. How is it appropriate to discuss the web in this manner? The web is a communication mechanism, and it was intended to be easy for people -- end users, real people -- to make their own webpages. Now it's just for "products" created by professional designers? We have given up so much.
  - mozumder 11y ago
    > We all have to deal with the designer's choices, good or bad. You'll have to deal with them anyways. Every government site is pretty much horrible - they don't even need any advanced UI capabilities to make them unusable. This discussion is about enabling advanced UI capabilities for top designers. > How is it appropriate to discuss the web in this manner? The web is a communication mechanism, and it was intended to be easy for people -- end users, real people -- to make their own webpages. The web is a one-way communications medium. It's not a two-way medium. You'll need to go to phone/chat/email for that. And, with a one-way medium, the message should be decided by the sender, not the receiver.

by nfoz 11y ago

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.

nfoz 11y ago
> The user should never be given control. > the designer should have control over every pixel on his product. That's why I can't increase the font sizes or zoom in on mobile browsing, to aid my poor eyesight. Sigh. Why should USERS never have control, but you give bad designers a free pass? That's an awfully totalitarian view of computing, and leads to many unbearable situations. > Of course, there are bad designers, but they get filtered out by users not going back to their site. No. As I mentioned in another comment, you can't just pick-and-choose websites like equivalent oranges. Each website is different, and while occasionally you can choose which blog you read, you can't so easily select which government agency you need to engage with. We all have to deal with the designer's choices, good or bad. A tangent, but back to this: > the designer should have control over every pixel on his product. How is it appropriate to discuss the web in this manner? The web is a communication mechanism, and it was intended to be easy for people -- end users, real people -- to make their own webpages. Now it's just for "products" created by professional designers? We have given up so much.
- mozumder 11y ago
  > We all have to deal with the designer's choices, good or bad. You'll have to deal with them anyways. Every government site is pretty much horrible - they don't even need any advanced UI capabilities to make them unusable. This discussion is about enabling advanced UI capabilities for top designers. > How is it appropriate to discuss the web in this manner? The web is a communication mechanism, and it was intended to be easy for people -- end users, real people -- to make their own webpages. The web is a one-way communications medium. It's not a two-way medium. You'll need to go to phone/chat/email for that. And, with a one-way medium, the message should be decided by the sender, not the receiver.