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Who Killed the Scrollbar?

ello.co

11–20 of 325 posts

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#11
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.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#13
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...

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#14
post #5

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?

This is absolutely terrifying thinking. You seem to believe that readers are passive consumers of a stream, and should not have agency in their consumption of said streams.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#15

> 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…

>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.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#16
post #11

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 o…

I’d argue scroll bars are often a “good enough” solution that you get for free and require very little maintenance.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#17
post #10

> 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.

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.

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

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#18
post #3

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…

Incessant hamburgerization is something that I also find annoying. Any time I have to set up Firefox, the very first thing I do is enable the menu bar.

My desktop isn't a tablet - stop trying to make it one!

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#19

> 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.

Having no scrollbar could be descrbied as a broken web experience in my opinion. And I actually think that begin able to modify webpage to your liking is important, even if it means breaking the page in the process (I'm kind of used to it with umatrix) I do agree that in an ideal world, every webpage would be an amazing web experience, but unfortunately that's not the case, even with big websites with amazing UX desg…

Can you share a webpage that actually hides scrollbars? Aside from having a crazy amount of padding and shoving a scrollbar behind some div, how can you actually hide scrollbars cross browser?
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