
Who Killed the Scrollbar? - dredmorbius
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq
======
buboard
Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of
everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent
information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand
hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page
where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up
and down all the time (I browse reddit in old mode - it's just better)

~~~
city41
I was pretty blown away to see that Dropbox's hamburger menu opens to take
over the entire screen, including on desktop. In other words, they only
considered mobile in their design. You can try it even if you don't have an
account, just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.

~~~
Zelphyr
I see this happening a lot. "Mobile first!" doesn't mean "Mobile only!"

~~~
clhodapp
It kinda does though, because modern software companies tend to shift focus
away from projects before they get completely "done". The whole reason for
"mobile first" is the tacit admission that whatever is not the primary focus
will often get drastically less attention because there's already something
that sorta "works".

~~~
erikpukinskis
There’s truth in what you’re saying, especially in the “things mostly suck, so
expect that” world.

But in the ideal world you’re wrong... it’s fundamentally easier to start with
a mobile design and make some specific interventions to make it work well on
desktop than to do the opposite.

Whether anyone actually makes those interventions is, as you indicate,
somewhat unlikely.

------
novok
The reason why scrollbars are not a first class UI widget in mobile UIs is
because they are finger based, which means every manipulable widget needs to
be finger sized. Making scroll bars finger sized takes up way too much screen
space in mobile UI, so they were regulated to a passive progress bar indicator
and the scrollbar actions were moved into swipe gestures instead. With that
change you lose the ability to precisely skip around your location, probably
because a desktop usage study showed that most people didn't use the the
scroll bar much once scroll wheel mice were available.

Scroll bars only work with precision mice actions, and now desktop UX is
legacy UX, mobile UX concepts enroach onto desktop UX, because developers do
not like to create special cases, because that is more work and thus more $$$.

~~~
JohnFen
> The reason why scrollbars are not a first class UI widget in mobile UIs is
> because they are finger based, which means every manipulable widget needs to
> be finger sized

And yet, several mobile apps I use routinely have found a way to make it work
reasonably well. They use a slim line of a scrollbar to indicate where you
are, and if you touch the scrollbar then a larger finger-friendly handle
appears which can be used like a traditional scrollbar.

But I'm much more forgiving of UI compromises that are forced by the
limitations of mobile devices. It's when those same compromises are used on
the desktop that I have a problem -- that's just degrading the UX for no good
reason.

~~~
novok
Testing on my iOS device, I don't think it's an app thing, but UIKit standard
thing that comes with scrollviews. The bar doesn't become finger thick, but
it's still usable. I've been using iOS devices for a long time, so it shows
you how hidden it is.

I agree it's sloppy on desktops, but it helps to understand the reasons why
the sloppyness happens. Kind of like electron apps :p

~~~
deergomoo
I believe it’s new in iOS 13

~~~
redwall_hp
Way back in 2008, the Music app made use of this sort of feature (baked into
UIKit). Table views can be "indexed," meaning you get A, B, C, etc down the
side, and can swipe on it to move faster down the list.

~~~
saagarjha
Contacts still has this.

------
vezycash
Let's not dance around in a circle - Apple started this with their "minimalist
design." First on desktop and later with mobile.

Fact of life is everyone copies Apple. Apple doesn't copy and paste things.
They'll think deeply before copying. And will modify things to fit their
unique needs and situation.

Unfortunately, those who copy Apple switch off their brains and pursue the
"looks" ALONE, ignore the "feel" and just mess everything up.

The next big culprit is Google's Android with their let's just hide everything
- hamburger.

Microsoft, the final boss, attempted to beat Apple in design. The result was
Metro UI - a beautiful, text heavy, flat, design (they changed the name too
many times to keep track off.)

Microsoft turned off their brains as well. The result:

They hid every thing - scroll bars, status bars and title bars. Wasted
valuable screen real estate - empty spaces everywhere. Created a much hated
start-screen with scroll bars that moved horizontally instead of vertically.
And to make matters worse, moved in the opposite direction of scroll wheel.
(Perfect if navigating with a finger but very confusing if using the mouse. It
clashed with 20 years of mouse knowledge)

That's why people hated Windows 8.

Both Apple and Google riffed off Metro design. Google calls theirs material
design, don't know what Apple named theirs.

If this article was titled, Who Killed Ports, 3.5mm audio jack, repairability,
screws, or upgradable ram? The answer would still be Apple.

Summary: Prioritizing form over function is cancerous.

~~~
JohnFen
> Fact of life is everyone copies Apple.

And I really, really wish they'd stop it.

~~~
dredmorbius
A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really _is_ a useful
thing.

Apple is, generally, good in many particulars. It is _extremely_ conservative,
with only two desktop models (Classic Mac, 1984 - 2000, OS X, 2001 - 2019, and
ongoing, which is to say, _longer_ than the original interface). It is
ultimately completely antithetical to how I work in desktop, and I find myself
vastly prefering Linux and the option of selecting a desktop environment.
Ironically: Windowmaker, based on the foundations of the OSX Aqua desktop,
NextStep.

Increasingly it seems that Apple is stuck with implications of design
decisions made decades ago which correspond increasinly poorly to current
practices. The high cost of cycling between applications in particular. No, I
_don 't_ want ALL FLIPPING WINDOWS of an app to pop up when I switch between
the primary current working windows of two different apps. Or workspace
flipping as I switch / open new app windows.

Apple's third OS UI, iOS, has a tremendous number of shortcomings. As do
virtually all other mobile interfaces. I'm coming to the conclusion that any
screen size < 10-15 CM is simply too small to be useful, and prefer a minmum
9-10" (20-25 cm) devices myself.

~~~
JohnFen
> A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really is a useful
> thing.

Yes, in principle. But it becomes less than useful when the common schemas get
in my way, which has been an increasing problem over the past few years. The
aping of Apple's decisions appears to be a large part of why.

~~~
dredmorbius
Agreed.

As jwz has noted, _UI is different_ , in that changes to it provide relatively
little payback:

 _[I]n the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release early,
release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history has
proven that UI is different than software._

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-
i-use-safari-instead-of-firefox/)

(HN-safe archive link.)

The bulk of _present_ UI/UX metaphors can be traced _directly_ to the Mother
of All Demos, now _over fifty years old_ :

[https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

That said: from MoAD onward, the use-case has been of a _desktop_ (or very-
desktop-like laptop) system, with keyboard, pointer (mouse, tablet, light pen,
etc.), used at something vaguely resembling a desk or table.

It's not even the screen size of mobile devices _in raw resolution_ that's so
different -- early GUI computers had as little as 640x480 (VGA) resolution _or
less_. The original iPad was 1024x768.

But no keyboard, and finger-on-glass manipulation, call for a very different
set of control and design considerations. A mouse pointer can have pixel-
accuracy control. Fingers cover a probabalistic smear of screen space tens of
pixels across _and hide the screen elements they 're affecting_ at the same
time.

(And that's before you introduce such joys as screens repainting and
repositioning as / before you complete a touch action.)

The real question is _how to achieve concensus for new design and to void bad
entrenched patterns_ across a highly fragmented design industry. Ranty
flipping blog posts are one possible solution....

~~~
nine_k
This is "easy" to solve!

Come up with a really good UI concept, implement it, and see everybody love
it.

Avoid patenting it through the nose, and let everyone copy most of it. This is
how it will become the standard and win the world adoption.

It seems like you'd need millions of R&D budget spent in a large part for
public good, or at least to seriously change the market landscape without a
guarantee you'll dominate it.

------
jacobsenscott
I'm old enough that I started out building desktop apps with native widgets.
You had consistent, easy to use UIs, and they were pretty much the same no
matter what application you where in. Building the UI was considered they easy
part. You could even draw the thing with drawing tools! Since the native
widgets were designed by people who spend all day thinking about UI, user
testing UI, etc everything pretty much just worked, and worked well.

Fast forward to today. There's no such thing as "native widgets" in a web app.
So everyone rolls their own. Everyone keeps making the same mistakes over and
over again. Everyone is chasing fads. There is no consistency from app to app.
Today building the UI is the hard part.

(x-windows was the exception of course - you could choose from a dozen badly
designed window managers and widget sets.)

~~~
zozbot234
> There's no such thing as "native widgets" in a web app.

HTML form elements are essentially "native" widgets, if only native to the
browser. The problem with them is that older browsers lack support for many
desirable widgets (e.g. calendar date entry), so some "UI-building" work is
still needed.

~~~
tabtab
There _should_ be an HTTP-friendly GUI standard and we should have GUI
browsers that implement all the common GUI widgets we know and love rather
than emulate them with buggy clunky JavaScript/DOM/CSS. And be state-friendly
to avoid having to use Ajax-like techniques to get desktop-like state.

The industry is simply _missing_ a standard. Everyone was hoping HTML/JS/CSS
would mature enough to solve it, but it didn't, despite being given 2+
decades. Developing in and using web standards for anything data-centric or
highly interactive is a royal pain. You need rocket science to build a
bicycle. Time for a dedicated bicycle standard.

------
wlesieutre
> _2\. No flipping way to quickly navigate to the top or bottom of the post._

I don't know what the state of this is on Android, but iOS 13 lets you grab
the scrollbar and go immediately to wherever you want in a document.

The scrollbar doesn't show up by default, so it's a 2-step operation. Scroll a
bit to make the scroll indicator appear, then grab it and scroll faster.

Works well but I doubt many people are aware of it yet. People just assume you
can't grab the scroll indicator in iOS since Apple took that feature away when
they first launched the iPhone. Scroll bar has been non-interactable for the
last 12 years of their touch devices.

~~~
grawprog
>I don't know what the state of this is on Android, but iOS 13 lets you grab
the scrollbar and go immediately to wherever you want in a document.

It's inconsistent on android, it works like that with most things but
strangely not with some apps. You can't grab the scrollbar in Retroarch for
example, even though you can see it. It makes scrolling through huge lists of
ROMs extremely aggravating.

~~~
qubex
> _It’s inconsistent in Android_

The only thing consistent about Android is its inconsistency, but even that
can vary.

On a more serious note, I can’t find the date this was originally published
(??? Seriously?!) so I don’t know what OS and browser versions were prevalent
at the time of writing.

~~~
Groxx
Top right corner over by the user info - 3 years ago.

I double checked by going to their other posts - it is the post-age, not the
user-age, despite the "follow this user" button right next to it.

------
joshstrange
I actually prefer the current scollbar situation. I HATE when people hijack it
but I prefer it to disappear when I don't need it. I can always scroll a tiny
amount (magic mouse) to see my progress. I really do like the clearer look to
UI's without the bar.

> No flipping clue how long the flipping post flipping is.

> No flipping way to quickly navigate to the top or bottom of the post.

I've literally never had either one of these issues with a disappearing
scrollbar. OCCASIONALLY I have to try to grab it a second time but I'm more
than happy with that state of affairs.

Also calling out Ello at the end is rather weak IMHO. If you really hate the
lack of scrollbars so much then host your own blog...

~~~
JohnFen
> I prefer it to disappear when I don't need it.

My strong preference is the exact opposite of this. I want it to be there,
full size, any time that scrolling is possible.

It seems that this is something that should be user configurable.

~~~
jonhohle
System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: Always

~~~
JohnFen
Which system/application is this for? Unless I'm missing something (which is
entirely possible) it doesn't map to anything I use.

~~~
Miraste
It's a MacOS system-wide setting.

~~~
JohnFen
Ah, thank you. I couldn't find it because I don't have any Apple machines.

------
cronix
...and hijacking scroll behavior. Please stop that and just use the defaults,
like everyone expects. I'm tired of getting to a site and having it scroll
pages at a time when it should just scroll a few lines. And then trying to get
back to the correct spot is a pain. Who does this stuff and why do you think
it's necessary? What problem do you think you are solving by doing this? I
just hit the back button. I'm not going to struggle and fight the browser to
digest whatever it is you thought was important enough to print, because
you've made it unnecessarily difficult and complicated to consume.

~~~
hnick
Maybe I'm a unique and strange person but my preferred scroll behaviour when
reading a website is to middle click and move the mouse. Speed varies as the
mouse moves so if you move just a bit you can get the page to auto-scroll at
your perfect reading speed.

Of course, it's broken in a lot of sites, because many front end devs
apparently don't know or care that this exists.

------
agumonkey
I'm born in the 80s so it's not totally objective, but I know there's
something wrong when I boot up a win95 box and I don't miss 99% of so called
innovation regarding UI.

~~~
buboard
I doubt it's nostalgia, even though i m old too. It's just a lot more efficent
and faster to use, mouse and keyboard-wise. I often think to roll back to my
windows 7 as a more sane desktop environment.

Some of the biggest offenses i 've seen are google's web apps. Total loss of
hierarchy and replacement with elusive self-hiding buttons, even when it's
clear from their use case that they should never have been hamburgerized. I 'm
pretty sure, even in mobile, they are making the UX worse.

~~~
antocv
KDE or plasma whatever its name, is basically unchanged from 1995 UI
philosophy. The closest we can have today in 2019.

~~~
a_e_k
I run XFCE (via Xubuntu) on my home desktop for the same reason. The lightness
is a bonus.

~~~
mappu
Going off on a tangent, but KDE is lighter than XFCE these days.

Or at least
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-
prediction-kde-will-steal-the-lightweight-linux-desktop-crown-in-2020/) has
been making the rounds.

~~~
a_e_k
Thanks, I hadn't seen that. That's quite interesting. I'd ended up settling on
XFCE aound the time of the Gnome 2 / Gnome 3 / Unity schism. At the time, XFCE
had felt a bit snappier than KDE. I've lately been thinking about giving KDE a
try again, so this is good to know.

------
mixmastamyk
Scroll bars and top menus! One factor was the removal from the market of
anything but 16:9 displays which sucks as well. I want my workstation UI back
and to return the fischer-price bullshit on every OS. Windows and gnome are
the worst, every thing they do in the name of progress makes computers harder
to use.

I miss the simplicity of Windows 2000/XP classic, been downhill from there.
Ubuntu Mate is good but is suffering from the encroachment of gnome also.

Also took 15 years for dark themes to become allowed again due to loss of
theming functionality.

~~~
zozbot234
I can see the issues w/ Windows, but what's your beef with GNOME? It's the
only UX I know of that actually makes a touchscreen usable for non-trivial
tasks. (And many laptops feature touchscreens by now. Often with something
like a fully-rotating hinge, to enable touch-only use.)

~~~
mixmastamyk
I use a keyboard and mouse at my desk. Not interested in touching the screen
as it takes more effort and would need to be cleaned more often. I want easily
discoverable menus, easily used scrollbars, and a dark theme. Real work has
taken a backseat to play. I have an iPad/Phone for that and enjoy that at the
sofa. Two use cases, not one.

------
tw04
The same people who killed folders "because tags". Don't get me wrong, I love
tags, but why on earth can't we have BOTH???? I don't always remember what I
tagged something with, and searching through 8 years of work to find something
is useless.

~~~
yellowapple
Tags would be okay as a folders replacement if they, you know, actually
replaced folders. That is: if a tag can in turn have tags, and those tags
automatically apply to the tagged files, then it should be trivial to not only
emulate a folder hierarchy, but even _improve_ upon it by offering more
flexibility.

It'd also help substantially if more tag-centric applications were up-front
about which tags are already defined.

~~~
dredmorbius
LoCCS:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_classifica...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_classification_system)

Seriously.

(Or one of a _very_ few equivalents, possibly the Colon Classification.)

~~~
yellowapple
Tangentially, I find it amusing that the Library of Congress classifies the
Bible as "BS".

------
harsan
I personally believe that the proliferation of infinite scrolling/pagination
has a strong correlation with the disappearance of the scrollbar.

In a world before infinite scroll, the bottom of the page was indeed the last
bit of content on the page. In today's world, scrolling to the bottom of a
page typically loads more content.

In this new world, I can imagine designers and engineers deciding to do the
simple thing which is to remove the scroll bar since it's no longer usually an
accurate depiction of where the users position is in relation to all the
content available.

Of course all of this solely applies to feeds and not standalone pieces of
content like articles. In the latter cases I'm unsure beyond minimal
aesthetics why the scroll bar would be removed.

------
Stratoscope
Could I ask a related favor? Stop killing the Page Up / Page Down and cursor
keys.

Or put another way, if you have a main content section that is scrollable (and
the entire page isn't), then please make sure the focus is set to that
scrollable div on page load.

I loaded the linked article and tried to scroll with Page Down, and nothing
happened. I had to click inside the article body first, and only then could I
scroll it with the keyboard.

I think a lot of sites and apps are built by people who do all their scrolling
with the touchpad, and they _don 't know_ that there are other ways people
like to scroll and it is the designer/developer's job to make sure they all
work.

------
hanspragt
Pretty brave for posting on a site that breaks the back button.

~~~
dredmorbius
Ello is dead.

It was, for a while, promising, useful, and interesting. I'd posted content
there while that was the case.

(OP)

------
quelltext
For fuck's sake, if you need to be swearing (and I don't think it's necessary
at all), just use the actual words.

~~~
dredmorbius
I often do.

I've been (occasionally) experimenting with slight bowderilisation. For better
or worse, less swearing tends to go over slightly better. I can assure you the
feeling was there in the original.

My general administrative announcement (NSFW langauge):

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/dlz9c2z6x-tvkd7rxtxwpw](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/dlz9c2z6x-tvkd7rxtxwpw)

[https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/100521241625879766](https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/100521241625879766)

~~~
quelltext
Thing is I felt distracted by the amount of swearing, and the fake swears just
exaggerated that. I don't care about the swearing in principle, it just felt
misplaced in your article, in particular in this censored form.

Swearing helps convey frustration etc. and I guess that's what you were going
for, but it doesn't actually work for me (as the reader) in all cases and in
particular when it's "redacted".

Not that my opinion matters. I didn't intend this comment to be taken as
serious discussion item and maybe I should have just not commented.

~~~
dredmorbius
Fair points.

I wrote that some three years ago, among a series of rants (I don't recall the
others that accompanied it), moved to extreme annoyance, and after looking at
the initial result, decided to replace the initial language to tone it down a
bit.

Today I tossed it into the HN submissions queue following an earlier item on
similarly obnoxious and undiscoverable UI/UX, and was surprised to see the
item take off. Planning which HN submissions will succeed is _not_ a high-
probability endeavour.

The best way to read the language is "yeah, the author was pretty annoyed when
they wrote this, but decided to tone down the effect without removing all
references to that annoyance entirely".

I've written highly invecitve-filled pieces elsewhere. For public or private
consumption. It's when I _stop_ any swearing that feedback (and usage) is
quite likely to stop -- the outrage is a measure that I still care. Users past
caring don't remain long.

------
CivBase
I agree that scrollbars should be preserved. However, mobile screens are small
and the classic scrollbars we were used to a decade ago take up precious
space.

Actually, mobile scrollbars cause problems for me pretty often. My fat fingers
sometimes trigger the scrollbar instead when I mean to tap an element on the
right side of the screen. It's very infuriating when you suddenly jump to some
random spot in a large list and have to scroll to find where you were and try
again.

I would love to see I think the solution is to come up with a design that
indicates an element is scrollable. Maybe by darkening it at the bottom? A
scrollbar could be toggled when the user scrolls far enough, then hidden again
when the user stops scrolling for a while. Idk, I'm not a designer.

------
codeful
is it just me or anyone else? As soon as i open a page on desktop i always
look at the scrollbar first.

~~~
buboard
all the time - to assess how long the text is and decide whether to read it

------
makecheck
Agreed that these mobile-esque designs are out of control but some remedies
are:

\- In iOS Safari you can tap the area above the address bar to jump back to
the top of the web page.

\- On iOS 13, you can finally press-hold the scroll blob and drag it in a
sensible way.

\- When there is a keyboard that lacks page-up/page-down/home/end, using the
Command (Apple/Cloverleaf) key with up/down arrow tends to be equivalent to
home/end.

\- Fortunately a lot of web sites that have messed-up layouts still support
Reader View, which can restore some sanity and standard controls.

------
wmichelin
> It's not so bad on desktops, and I can restore it there anyway via CSS.

I wouldn't recommend trying to modify DOM elements via CSS or extensions if
you can avoid it. You're going to run into some broken web experiences.

Regarding scrollbars, you can set your OS to always show them. As a web dev,
I'm out here trying to advocate to never screw with scrollbars.

~~~
city41
OSX hiding scroll bars can be surprising for devs. You try your app on another
OS and realize you’ve got several unintended scroll bars. I always turn them
back on when working on OSX.

~~~
wmichelin
Yup, I learned this the hard way. We need to advocate for this within the
companies we work for. Turn on scrollbars!

------
markus_zhang
Sometimes I scroll down articles quickly just to make the hidden scrollbar
appears so that I can estimate the length. Very annoying.

However I do agree that removing scrollbars on Mobile has one advantage: I
simply can't accidentally move to the bottom of the page, which (no idea why)
I do it very often...

------
denton-scratch
I couldn't agree more. Screw hamburger menus, scriptified scrollbars, and
buttons that don't work properly. "Mobile first" is fine, but jeez, don't
break my desktop. I mean, srsly, what do you think you're playing at?

------
notadoc
Surely this is related to a concurrent thread

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920)

It's the flat design trend. It is unintuitive by design.

~~~
dredmorbius
It is.

I'd posted a link to the piece on that discussion and decided to toss it into
the submission queue on a lark. This got more attention than I'd expected.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356495)

------
jolux
You can grab the scrollbar in iOS 13. Not sure how recent that feature is
because I don’t really miss being able to do it on mobile so I don’t bother
trying. Which of course is not to say it’s a bad feature to have there.

------
paulddraper
> I swear heads have to roll. Literally.

Author had some good points, but that escalated quickly.

~~~
netfl0
I think he meant heads will have to _scroll_.

------
SubiculumCode
Ubuntu 16.04 Mate regions for resizing a window with te mouse is too small.
Scroll bars are often too small. If I have to move my mouse back and forth
trying not to miss...its not a good gui interface.

------
mark-r
For me the worst example is Google Play Music on my phone. The scroll bar is
there, but when you first open the app it's hidden underneath the pane at the
top of the screen - you have to scroll down by dragging the window before you
can even see it. Then if the window contents are long enough, as in when
you're looking at the entire song list, you can't actually grab the scroll
indicator unless you get really lucky - the sensitive part of the bar is much
smaller than the visual indicator.

It flipping drives me mad.

------
atemerev
Fast navigation = less engagement time = less ad revenue. Case solved.

------
gxqoz
I actually don't mind the lack of a scrollbar in the mobile version of Pocket.
There are times where I don't necessarily want to see the progress of the
article. The web version of Pocket seems fine to me.

What I really don't like is the Wall Street Journal mobile app which has an
unreliable scrollbar, presumably due to ads. Articles frequently end well
after you've scrolled to the "bottom" of the scrollbar so you can't ever tell
how far through you are.

------
squarefoot
An old dumb phone of mine had a mini trackball I found immensely useful. The
firmware (proprietary) was total garbage, but moving between menus was a
breeze. Having a trackball rather than a touch interface means that icons and
text don't need to be larger to be hit by a finger; all the user does is move
the trackball until the relevant object is focused or text highlighted, then
use it. Voila, lots of space saved for actual information.

------
marshray
The whole page appears as blank to me (Windows, Chrome, no addons, incognito
mode).

I suspect that actually reading the article is unnecessary at this point.

~~~
earthboundkid
It's a React SPA with no SSR. Why people do that for content only pages, I
have no fucking idea.

------
jokoon
Not to mention the scrollbar slider is almost invisible on windows 10 with the
dark theme, and there are no way to fix it.

That's an awful detail.

------
souprock
There aren't even any scrollbars on Hacker News. There are no scrollbars
anywhere.

Firefox may be to blame, but Ubuntu gets final responsibility. Firefox in
Ubuntu 18 simply doesn't do scroll bars. In case it is an unexpected culprit,
I switched to XFCE and then uninstalled a bunch of Unity stuff, but that
shouldn't break Firefox.

Fix?

~~~
lstodd
There's something very wrong with your install.

There are plenty of scrollbars here on xubuntu 18.04 and xubuntu 19.04

I don't know, maybe it's Unity aftereffects. I've been on xubuntu (xfce ubuntu
flavor) since before 14.04 came out. It never suprised me, which is the killer
feature. Also scrollbars.

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hartator
I guess it's not that important as this article doesn't display a scrollbar
either. /s

~~~
sp332
It mentions that at the bottom actually.

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Stevvo
A big part of the problem is it's not possible to customize the appearance of
the scrollbar in most browsers. It's pretty much the _only_ thing you can put
in a webpage that can't be changed with css, so designers avoid them.

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scarface74
Related:

No scroll bars on iOS makes it look like features aren’t available and no
indication that you need to scroll.

[https://tyler.io/perfectly-cropped/](https://tyler.io/perfectly-cropped/)

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miohtama
If you want to have a good scrolling experience with quick navigation for long
articles on mobile try Opera browser.

Opera double tap zoom is also the only one that can relayout non-mobile
friendly desktop paragraphs to mobile format.

~~~
dredmorbius
Thanks for the recommendation, though really this should be consistent for an
entire OS or at least application framework (native _and_ web), not something
that varies app-by-app.

Though if Opera are getting this right, good on them.

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JungleGymSam
I want to know why Android has absolutely ridiculous scrollbars that change
size as you're scrolling. This is the stupidest thing and it's been this way
forever. It makes them absolutely useless.

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fxleach
After the 5th "flipping" I stopped flipping reading the post.

~~~
dredmorbius
Do I have the flippin' friend for you:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356928)

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rdiddly
Also see, from earlier today:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920)

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officeplant
Who needs scrollbars when I've got my trusty PgUp & PgDn

~~~
antod
Lucky you. I'm noticing an increasingly shrinking ability for them to their
intended job lately. Sigh

~~~
kps
Many sites just don't bother to assign focus to the main content region. (I
don't think they even realize they're doing it wrong.) Page up/down work if
you first mouse-click there, assuming you can find a place to do that without
the page hijacking it.

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kevin_thibedeau
I'm glad scrollbars died on mobile. Right hand scroll bars are a PITA for left
handed use on a touch device.

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hayez1
Apple has actually brought useable scrollbars to iOS devices for the first
time in iOS 13.

~~~
code_duck
Which would be funny as from what I recall, to answer the headline, Apple led
the pack in removing scrollbars, from OSX back in about 2011.

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dreamcompiler
I wonder if part of this (the web part anyway) comes from a desire to monetize
content paragraph-by-paragraph. With simple HTML scrolling (which browsers are
really good at) it's hard to report what content is actually being read. With
JS-controlled pseudo-scrolling, that's easy but it makes for a lousy UX.

~~~
dredmorbius
That tends to result in highly-paginated articles. In the worst cases,
approaching paragraph-by-paragraph "slideshows" or pagination. An extreme
anti-pattern.

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m4r35n357
Idiots removed the triangles at top & bottom that you could use to scroll
without dragging. I think they did it because they are stupid and evil.

~~~
shadowgovt
They did it because the buttons took up room, were used by nearly nobody, and
(in the case of the "jump to top" / "jump to bottom" buttons) destroyed the
user's scroll state in a non-undoable way that was too easy to trigger.

~~~
dredmorbius
On touch devices, that's frequently the case.

Some form of multi-stage action (select/confirm) and a scroll-undo / scroll-
backnav (return to prior location w/in doc/screen/page) _might_ help.

Small-screen design is hard, and there are a number of distinct breakpoints at
which different concepts do and don't work.

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VWWHFSfQ
ello breaks the back button on my browser

i have to click back 2x in order to go back to my previous page.

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Muuuchem
Iphone

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hsnewman
From the story: "today's kids".

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ibero
This is a pretty fluff piece. There isn't really much explored here.

The only interesting idea I can write out is that the author says that knowing
the length/size of an article/book is intrinsically good. I do wonder if that
is necessarily true.

Maybe one can argue that knowing the length of a written word has resulted in
less people engaging?

~~~
coldtea
> _This is a pretty fluff piece. There isn 't really much explored here._

It's not supposed to explore anything, be amusing, or whatever.

It's just a rant about a certain specific UI trend.

> _The only interesting idea I can write out is that the author says that
> knowing the length /size of an article/book is intrinsically good_

That's not "the only interesting idea", in the sense that there were supposed
to be more but are missing, or they are there but are not interesting.

It is literally the one and only idea the author wanted to convey with this
post. They didn't set out to explore some vast expanse of UI design ideas.
Just to write a rant about the lack of scrollbars/indication of position.

> _I do wonder if that is necessarily true._

Yes it is.

> _Maybe one can argue that knowing the length of a written word has resulted
> in less people engaging?_

That's a problem for the content creator, not for the users...

~~~
ibero
For one, I remember a Google talk where they mentioned how the completion rate
of e-books were higher than physical ones. One of the theories which stuck
with me was that the reader not being aware of the end of the book could have
been* a driver.

~~~
coldtea
Yeah, this might be true, but that's a problem for the content provider I
think -- or even not even for them (since you have already bought their book).

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bstar77
"Lord knows, you can't actually grab the scrollbar and navigate with the
bloody thing."

Do these people not have scroll wheels or scrolling gestures on their touch
devices? I get it that some content is too long for scroll wheels, but it's
just bad design if you are having to contend with data sets that are that
large.

This just screams of old people screaming about change that they are not
comfortable with... and I'm old AF.

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dpcan
I actually think he's making a big deal out of nothing on this one. If you
have a site that gets long, it would be smart to create some kind of system
for jumping between sections, or scrolling up a great deal. Like Google Docs
does when editing a long document. I can jump between bookmarks and pages with
the "knob" on the right. But most websites don't need anything like this. It
should be the job of the developer of the site to realize their site DOES need
this, and implement some kind of smart solution.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
I know it sounds crazy, but what if there were an ubiquitous solution that
everyone was already familiar with and had used many times in the past, a
solution that required little thought from developers and behaved consistently
everywhere?

Something like... well, a scroll bar, at least before devs started being cute
and hiding them for the sole purpose of aesthetics.

~~~
dpcan
Because a scroll bar taking up real estate on the right side of a phone screen
that is hard to touch because it's so thin is silly.

A knob on the right that's easily grabbed and barely covers anything is
better.

