
Scrollbars: Why is Apple eradicating a linchpin of user interface design? - davewiner
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/11/computer_scrollbars_why_is_apple_eradicating_a_linchpin_of_user_interface_design_.html
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crazygringo
As soon as I installed Lion, I thought I'd feel the same way.

But your post just made me realize: I haven't missed scroll bars a bit. And if
you wonder if there's more content in a window, a tiny jiggle with your finger
instantly reveals that.

Interestingly enough, I've even traded my Magic Mouse at work for a Magic
Trackpad -- the new paradigm of gestures and swiping etc. is so useful, I
don't think I'll ever go back (except when I have to do graphic design work, a
mouse is essential).

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Bud
a) Because it's not a "linchpin" anymore. With the advent of touch interfaces
(which will sooner rather than later account for most browsing), scroll-wheel
mice, and trackpads, the days in which scrolling was best/easiest accomplished
by clicking on annoying ever-present pixel-wasting scrollbar arrows have
ended. Good riddance to them.

b) Apple didn't eradicate anything; you can still turn the old-fashioned
scrollbars back on if you choose. They just changed the default to suit what
Apple believes to be what most users will choose, now and in the near future,
with the hardware that most of them will be using most of the time.

~~~
jaylevitt
But what percentage of Lion users are on touch screens?

Zero?

Edit: For some reason I'd read the parent as saying that you didn't need
visual feedback on a touch screen, which of course, you still don't have with
a trackpad. Not sure how I got that.

~~~
j79
While it's not a touch screen, the track pads on MacBook Pros and the Magic
TrackPad for desktops provide many of the touch gestures found on touch
devices. So, touch screens? Maybe zero. Touch enabled? Plenty!

And, to be honest, touch gestures in general are a very welcomed change to the
OS. I find the use of a mouse only needed for precision control (say,
graphical work or gaming!)

~~~
jaylevitt
Yep - in fact, I switched from a Mac Pro to a MacBook Pro largely because
there was no way, at the time, to get a multitouch trackpad. I love the
gestures.

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gamble
It's incidents like this that always remind me how surprisingly conservative
geeks can be about relatively minor changes.

I love the iOS-style scroll bars and natural scrolling in Lion. The fact that
Apple is willing to make minor changes like this despite inevitable bitching
by geeks is one of the things I most respect about the company.

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YooLi
Wouldn't the fact that Apple is able to remove the scrollbars in several
situations imply that they aren't a 'linchpin' of UI design?

I rather like that I get a little extra real-estate, but some times I would
like a visual indicator that there is more to a page off-screen. The
indicator, however, need not be a scroll-bar.

~~~
LeafStorm
Lukas Mathis proposes an interesting solution for the "visual indicator:"
[http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/08/01/invisible_scrollbar...](http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/08/01/invisible_scrollbars/)

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makecheck
I'm not sure how people deal with the disappearing scroll bars if they don't
have a scroll-wheel mouse. For me the missing bars are fine because I can make
them reappear at any time by lightly touching the scroll wheel.

They are also surprisingly nice for the column views on Mac OS X (an interface
that basically consisted of a horizontal scroll bar over a range of several
vertical-scrolling lists). Now, without scroll bars, the column views look so
much more _sensible_ ; before they seemed to be littered with chrome.

I don't think scroll bars should disappear _completely_ though. It seems that
muting them (e.g. becoming light gray and translucent, or thinner like they
are on Linux) would be enough to keep them out of the way.

It would also help if there were some additional cue, e.g. a "fade-out" effect
at the edges where more content is available offscreen.

~~~
barumrho
As far as I know, scroll bars do not disappear for third party mice, but they
do if you are using Apple's trackpad or magic mouse.

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trentonstrong
I wish I could remember where I read this, or that my Google-fu was strong
today, but not too long ago I read an article or mailing list post about (far-
future) plans to get away from scrolling as a paradigm for navigating web
pages. It is a sort of unquestioned dogma that content must be laid out
vertically in a linear fashion. If I remember correctly, what was being
proposed was something more contextual or reactive in nature, like flipping
pages left and right or some other topology. That doesn't seem like it differs
too much from hyperlinks so I must not be recalling some important fact.

Anyways, hopefully someone who knows more about what I'm trying to remember
will see this.

~~~
gujk
We had pages before we had computers. Unbroken or variable-broken document
flow was a feature computers added.

~~~
dbvisel
Historically: scrolls existed before pages, though pages were clearly the
superior technology.

~~~
kstenerud
Pages were superior because:

1\. Scrolls were more difficult to handle as you read.

2\. You could jump around to various places in a long book document, but with
a scroll you had to manually unravel it to the point you were looking for, a
time consuming process.

3\. Books were not without their difficulties, however:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ>

But in all seriousness, the scroll concept works perfectly well, in fact
better than the book concept, provided you have the right technology to drive
it. And modern computers have that technology. I can use a search box to jump
to wherever I want. I can quickly scroll up and down in the document using a
scroll bar rather than paging through a book.

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thezilch
This is one characteristic of Unity (Canonical -- Ubuntu) that I think got it
right: [http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/introducing-overlay-
scro...](http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/introducing-overlay-scrollbars-
in-unity/), which leaves only small indicators until the bar is in proximity
to the cursor (or in use). It'd be a nice touch to mobile applications, like
with Android, where the scrollbar only needs to be represented by 2-3 pixels.

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simonhamp
My __only __gripe with the smaller, hiding scrollbars is that window content
goes under them and becomes occluded by them, making it near-impossible to
click.

Case in point is the Chrome dev tools. Checkboxes for hotswitching CSS rules
now lie directly under the scrollbar and I keep catching it when I go to
untick one.

Other than that, I really don't miss them at all

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tsunamifury
I'm pretty sure Apple is focusing on creating visual metaphors which have a
more complete real-world comparisons. There is no real-world comparison for a
'scroll bar'.

The newer UI systems are imitating paper more accurate: stacks, page turns and
scrolling -- the scrollbar has less of a place in that visual metaphor.

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ByteMuse
I recently worked on a friend's macbook and this is the first thing I noticed;
I'm a linux guy. After a less then ten second explanation, I got used to it.

Personally, I thought it was a nice touch - there's almost no added cost to
the user, more importantly, it cleans up the interface and frees up a few px
of width.

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jheriko
Actually - my experience of the new gmail interface with chrome is that I get
an extra (and wholly redundant) scrollbar as a result of everything being just
a little too big to fit.

Even worse the scroll bar that is part of gmail doesn't look anything like
native scroll bars.

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joejohnson
It's still there when you need it. And you can turn them on again if you want
(on OS X).

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spaznode
Answer: scroll bars suck

