
Mozilla Bug 77790: Style the scrollbar - scrollaway
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790
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jstsch
No, you shouldn't style your scrollbars when they are part of the browser
chrome and simply scroll a page. Yes, you should be able to style your
scrollbars when they're part of your website/application.

Those JS solutions out there are quite sucky. Oh, hey, sorry, we just broke
scrolling down using your spacebar.

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Narretz
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.

~~~
nfoz
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?

~~~
mozumder
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
> 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
> 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.

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geonic
Funny to see how the original bug reporter (Skewer) hung around for about 18
months before other people continued the discussion for the past 13 years. I
wonder where Skewer is today and what he thinks about the feature.

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Zekio
personally i would rather they made the scroll bar like in IE, Where it
doesn't push content, but it is on top of it so whole page doesn't get pushed
slightly if it appear dynamically.

~~~
orivej
There is a number of user styles (installable with Stylish [1]) that replace
default scroll bars with floating ones. I find this [2] particularly nice.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/firefox/addon/stylish/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/firefox/addon/stylish/) [2] [https://userstyles.org/styles/83431/minimal-
floating-scrollb...](https://userstyles.org/styles/83431/minimal-floating-
scrollbars-for-firefox-windows)

~~~
lewisl9029
I've been using this for a while in Firefox.

These kinds of floating scroll bars really should be the default for all OSes.
Presence of scroll bars changing the width of the window contents and causing
repaints/reflows is really poor UX in my humble opinion.

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evanm
A pre-9/11 ticket.

~~~
knodi123
Ah yes, 'twas a simpler time.

