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Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

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Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#31

Post by xdennis »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #26
xdennis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the point is that you don't know if there's more content without trying to scroll. That's why so many websites have pointless scroll arrows inviting you to scroll.

Having an always on scrollbar may save you from trying to have to scroll. But not knowing if you can scroll is caused by poor website design and not by a hidden scrollbar

You don't need to design your way out of a problem with a custom solution every time if you just add the scroll bar.

Being fooled into believing there's no more content is often incidental: some gap in the content aligns perfectly with the bottom of the window. (This is especially the case with designer websites which use a lot of blank spaces.) You shouldn't need a custom solution.

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#32

Post by nine_k »

The5thElephant wrote: post #23

Thanks to scroll wheels and trackpads I don't need to awkwardly click and drag a scrollbar, and 99% of the time where I am in the scroll is irrelevant to me, so I very much prefer the disappearing scrollbar and the fact that the only people I see who turn it back on are a small percentage of developers it is fairly clear most users don't really miss it either. That being said I would love if it was easier to add an o…

I'm fine with the scroll bar disappearing as a control.

But I badly want it as an indicator. More than once, using macOS or mobile OSes I could not realize that an area contains much more items than meets the eye, because nothing suggested that I should scroll.

This, of course, is due to the general tendency of throwing UI discoverability under the bus of "clean looks".

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#33

Post by samemail88 »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #13
samemail88 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, at least with the phone, there's limited screen. There's NO reason why the scrollbar should be invisible for the desktop though.

You can hide it for the same reason people choose to hide their bookmark bar, or reading list, or dock. They simply don't want it to take up room on the screen so they can focus on the website

What if Apple took your argument to the extreme and remove the URL bar, back button and the tabs bar so you can focus on the website? Would you be OK with that?

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#34

Post by samemail88 »

protastus wrote: post #21

Apple, Android, Windows. Every OS has jumped into this bandwagon. Usability keeps deteriorating at the expense of aesthetics. I resent designers for messing up user experience, pushing the industry away from good solutions that were discovered and implemented decades ago.

I think Apple was the first to jump on this bandwagon. The others are following along.

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#36

Post by wtallis »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #24
wtallis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before the scroll bar it was nesting it deep within menus. I'm not sure which version of Windows you think predated scroll bars, but I'm pretty sure it didn't have any telemetry reporting back to Microsoft over the internet.

What I meant was auto-hiding scrollbars. Do you think having visible scroll-bars does anything if Microsoft just re-enables those settings when you update windows?

> if Microsoft just re-enables those settings when you update windows?

That's another matter entirely. Microsoft's current strategy is to give at least some appearance of getting informed consent for those anti-features. Silently re-enabling them during an update without asking the user would be much more likely to get them in trouble.

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#37

Post by justsomehnguy »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #13
samemail88 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, at least with the phone, there's limited screen. There's NO reason why the scrollbar should be invisible for the desktop though.

You can hide it for the same reason people choose to hide their bookmark bar, or reading list, or dock. They simply don't want it to take up room on the screen so they can focus on the website

> so they can focus on the website

You mean those wide-load, content dense websites like this? https://imgur.com/a/6pQAXWP

BTW the only site I know what supports wide-load toggle is https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/UNIX

And F11 still works.

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#39

Post by StewardMcOy »

rocket_surgeron wrote: post #28
protastus wrote: post #21

Apple, Android, Windows. Every OS has jumped into this bandwagon. Usability keeps deteriorating at the expense of aesthetics. I resent designers for messing up user experience, pushing the industry away from good solutions that were discovered and implemented decades ago.

For me personally, a persistent scrollbar is as relevant to usability as the {x,y} coordinates that old Unix windowing systems like MWM or CDE used to draw whenever you moved or resized a window. There were many, MANY extremely intelligent and highly technical people who got into very long flame wars when the feature of displaying the X and Y coordinates of the center of a window and the corners whenever it was moved…

I see this framed as a touch vs. mouse debate often, and it's understandable since non-persistent scrollbars originated on smartphones, but I think even touch interfaces would benefit from persistent scrollbars.

At my work, we recently had a bug filed where a lot of users were reporting that one of the pages didn't have all the controls it ought to. It turned out that those users needed to scroll down to get to those controls, but they didn't realize they could scroll. At the common viewport size they were using, the page looked complete. It didn't look like there was anything to scroll.

If there was a persistent scrollbar, the user could have easily seen that there was more content to scroll to.

Now, you could say that the design of that page was bad if users had to scroll to important controls, and you might have a good case. In this case, the controls weren't the most important part of the page, and modern design favors decreasing density. There are always going to be cases where users aren't going to realize they can scroll.

Windows phone tried to solve this is in the most disorienting way possible by making sure things were always getting cut off on the sides that you could scroll, but other than that blip in history, there's been no standard replacement for the scrollbar for informing users they can scroll.

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#40

Post by layer8 »

david2ndaccount wrote: post #38

If you are using a trackpad or a touch screen, they are not very useful.

They serve to indicate the scroll position and the relative size of the scrolled view (and the fact that there is a scrollable view in the first place), and to quickly scroll a longer range.
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