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Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

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Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#91

Post by liability »

bradstewart wrote: post #65
dgellow wrote: post #12

Another one of such thing: please try to scroll on your site using a mouse wheel from time to time, even if you're normally using a touchpad (from your laptop or an external one)! Lot of fancy homepage with scroll animations are awful on anything that isn't scrolling as smoothly as a MacBookPro touchpad. Example: https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/ is horrible to use on anything that isn't a mobile device or a Mac.

Developers (seemingly a lot of them?) use a touchpad as their primary input device on a regular basis? I guess this is an example of being in my own bubble, but I can't stand touchpads. I've used the touchpad on MacBook, like, twice in 2 years.

I would expect devs who use macbooks to generally use them the same way as the general population generally uses them. I can't think of a plausible reason to suspect that developers specifically might prefer traditional mice.

One demographic I would expect traditional mouse usage from would be gamers. When I play a first person game I always use my trusty old intellimouse. Otherwise, I use the trackpad unless I'm simultaneously using my mechanical keyboard, but if my keyboard had an attached trackpad I'd probably be using that. But mousing in general just isn't a very important to my workflows and trackpads work just as well as mice for nearly all tasks. Arguably they work better for some since you don't have to move your hand far from the laptop's keyboard to use the trackpad, while using a dedicated mouse means taking your hand completely off the keyboard.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#92

Post by elliekelly »

pcmaffey wrote: post #55
m4tthumphrey wrote: post #11

I loathe the fact that scrollbars are now hidden. I'm constantly looking for it to either a) find out how big the page is b) scroll more precisely I don't even understand why they would remove them? Who ever complained of a scroll bar?

Infinite scroll pages have also contributed to their demise...

Infinite scroll often make it nearly impossible to click on the site's privacy policy or terms of service in the page footer without going into dev tools. Whenever I come across that issue I wonder whether it's a feature or a bug.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#93

Post by zeveb »

> In 2011, Apple released Mac OS X Lion which introduced an enhanced scrollbar behavior that made scrollbars hidden by default.

I don't think hiding scrollbars can really be termed an enhancement; 'mistake' at best or 'user-hostile behavior' at worst seem more appropriate.

The original Macintosh GUI succeeded so well because it made it so easy to see what was possible. It laid an awful lot of stuff out right there on the screen in front of the user, and what was hidden was easy to get at. They spent a ton of time testing an improving usability. Modern macOS, OTOH, just doesn't feel right anymore; I suspect it is designed to look good, not to be usable.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#95

Post by soco »

supernova87a wrote: post #18

I have to pile onto the criticism of the hidden scroll bars, and other similar features (like the hidden buttons of PDF viewers now, such as in Chrome). Discoverability is a problem. For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when…

Especially with the usual screen ratios nowadays, their huge width goes unused 99% of the time anyway. So there's an only 1% incentive from usability side to remove the right vertical scrollbar... As a matter of fact, I actually use in my Firefox vertical tabs stacked left, to spare me some vertical space on the laptop screen.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#96

Post by Kaytaro »

pcr910303 wrote: post #82

Really, am I the only person here who can't understand the complaints on hiding scrollbars? I do agree with a lot of things that resonates HN, but this is one thing that I have never understood. Stop complaining about discoverability, everyone that knows how to browse the web knows how to scroll. It's like worrying whether the user will know how to use a mouse when you're designing a web page. Scrolling is not someth…

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I can't think of a reason for scrollbars to exist in the first place. You always have a physical way to scroll. If a user doesn't know how to scroll, it's a problem with the device, not your software. The only purpose of the scroll bar is to show your current position in the page, which doesn't require persistence.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#97

Post by ricardobeat »

jakub_g wrote: post #71

If you read between the lines, you should understand that the root cause of issue is the macOS developer monoculture. All you need is one Windows or Linux-based developer in your team to catch those kind of issues. But so many dev teams are macOS-only those days, whereas, apart from US and 2-3 other rich countries, 80%+ or even more of actual desktop users are Windows-based. (There are many other problems with macOS…

All you need is a round of testing for cross-browser compatibility. It's a pretty much solved problem by now, doesn't take that much time and can be automated. There is nothing stopping every developer from doing it - besides the usual pressure to deliver features in place of proper engineering.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#98

Post by x87678r »

jakub_g wrote: post #71

If you read between the lines, you should understand that the root cause of issue is the macOS developer monoculture. All you need is one Windows or Linux-based developer in your team to catch those kind of issues. But so many dev teams are macOS-only those days, whereas, apart from US and 2-3 other rich countries, 80%+ or even more of actual desktop users are Windows-based. (There are many other problems with macOS…

> outside of your country ... most people do not have a Mac,

I think you mean outside of the Bay Area. For PCs/Desktop Apple has like 12% market share in the US. 7% globally.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#100

Post by 3np »

jakub_g wrote: post #71

If you read between the lines, you should understand that the root cause of issue is the macOS developer monoculture. All you need is one Windows or Linux-based developer in your team to catch those kind of issues. But so many dev teams are macOS-only those days, whereas, apart from US and 2-3 other rich countries, 80%+ or even more of actual desktop users are Windows-based. (There are many other problems with macOS…

The most obnoxious I've seen of US-centrism shining through is a registration page - forgot where - where you could select country (optional) and US state (required, no "none")
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