
Custom Scrollbars in WebKit - jimsteinhart
http://css-tricks.com/custom-scrollbars-in-webkit/
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edu
No, not again. I hoped that the custom scroll bars idea died in 1999...

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alexmuller
I was reading it thinking the same thing, but the scrollbars on
<http://maxvoltar.com/> actually look and work nicely.

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Stuk
But completely ignore Fitt's Law. Usually I can speed my mouse to the right of
the screen, click, drag. Here I speed to the right of the screen, maybe try
clicking and dragging, fail, move in 30 pixels, overshoot, move back and
finally can scroll.*

The problem with allowing the customisation of scrollbars is that most people
are going to make them worse.

* Personally I use the scroll wheel, but I know a lot of people who don't.

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mnutt
I'll bet he could widen the target area while still retaining the original
design.

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MatthewPhillips
To what gain? Custom scrollbars are unnecessary on this page. It makes sense
on a scrollable div with lots of content around it; big fat default scrollbars
are distracting in that scenario. But this page is a document. It breaks the
expectations of the user (what is this thin line on the right of the screen
and why can't I see the rest of the document?).

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daleharvey
Its fairly predictable that the reaction to these would be "ugh browsers
shouldnt let people do that" but the web is growing up and it is not purely a
document delivery platform anymore, there are a lot of cases when a large
scrollbar takes up valuable space within a small pane within an applications.

now along the same lines, when are we gonna get clipboard access

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rglover
On regular websites, if done poorly custom scrollbars are not only useless but
a major distraction. I like the idea when working on web apps, though. Most
native apps take on a custom style (e.g. iTunes), and it's nice to mimic this
and give the user a sense of working within a native application. Guess it's
just preference though.

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pavlov
On Mac OS X, it seems that 99% of apps don't mess with the scrollbars (except
for dark HUD-style windows and a other rare special cases where the default
look would be too out of place).

iTunes is the lone offender. Those weird flat scrollbars were introduced a
couple of years ago -- maybe iTunes 7.0. Perhaps Apple's justification for the
change was that they wanted iTunes to look the same on both Mac and Windows.

(Edit -- it worth mentioning that 10.7 Lion will introduce iOS-style
scrollbars to the Mac, so we can probably look forward to more freeform
scrolling experimentation by app developers as well.)

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Entlin
I often scroll down using space or the pagedown key. This has worked with
every webpage I've encountered so far.

While I don't care about the styling, every single linked example on that page
doesn't work with space or the pagedown key. I wish there was a bit more
polish here...

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shadowpwner
The linked example, <http://maxvoltar.com>, works fine for me for the spacebar
and pagedown. I'm using Chrome beta build.

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Entlin
It doesn't for me. I have to click on the page first to make them work. OS X
10.6.7 / Safari 5.0.5 here (basically the newest thing you can get from
Apple).

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michh
Ugh, custom scrollbars.

If you're going to do it (but please, don't), do it like this. Not with some
crummy Flash applet. I'm talking to you, Vimeo.

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lloeki
As long as it merely "skins" the toolbar and doesn't try to override the
browser scrolling function, like this terrible, terrible WordPress iPad theme
which scrolls through javascript, making it ridiculously jerky and just
weird... We're already "skinning" input elements with CSS which by default
would look native to the OS, so that makes sense.

The web has grown up since IE5 (where you could merely _color_ the scrollbar)
and graphic designers will design some proper ones fitting with the whole site
design, while a bad scrollbar design will just be an element of an equally bad
site otherwise.

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antidaily
I was forced (by the client) to use custom scrollbars for a project about a
year ago. Ended up using jscrollpane, a jquery plugin. This seems like a
better solution.

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rhartsock
KILL IT!

