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Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

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Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#51

Post by v0idzer0 »

hulitu wrote: post #45
rocket_surgeron wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

" What use case is there?" I need to scroll the damn thing. Not with the mouse scroll ( too rough) not with the keyboard ( i don't want to lose keyboard focus from the current element). I just need to scroll. I don't have time to wait until the scrollbar appears, i don't want to click for it to appear. I just want it there.

All you have to do is hover the area where it lives and it appears. You’d have to hover the area anyway to touch it. It’s entirely inconsequential to usability and obviously looks significantly better

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#52

Post by grosswait »

v0idzer0 wrote: post #51
hulitu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" What use case is there?" I need to scroll the damn thing. Not with the mouse scroll ( too rough) not with the keyboard ( i don't want to lose keyboard focus from the current element). I just need to scroll. I don't have time to wait until the scrollbar appears, i don't want to click for it to appear. I just want it there.

All you have to do is hover the area where it lives and it appears. You’d have to hover the area anyway to touch it. It’s entirely inconsequential to usability and obviously looks significantly better

Sometimes the scroll bar that appears when hovering is so thin one must move back and forth to zero in on it while it disappears until you’ve finally found the spot. I would much prefer it just stay visible rather than play hide and seek.

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#53

Post by ksaj »

grosswait wrote: post #52
v0idzer0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you have to do is hover the area where it lives and it appears. You’d have to hover the area anyway to touch it. It’s entirely inconsequential to usability and obviously looks significantly better

Sometimes the scroll bar that appears when hovering is so thin one must move back and forth to zero in on it while it disappears until you’ve finally found the spot. I would much prefer it just stay visible rather than play hide and seek.

Agreed. Also I read a lot of long text pages, so it's nice to see the scroll bar as a position marker.

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#54

Post by ksaj »

hourago wrote: post #30

This makes a lot of sense. Like with brutalism the first designers created beautiful and useful art. But as the movement expanded, limited time and budget, bad copies, and misunderstanding of the movement created authentic monstrosities. In some cases removing the bar made sense. Now it's just fancy copy/paste where it does not apply and the bar would have been useful.

The library for University of Toronto is a pretty awesome example of brutalism done right. It looks different from every side, and it is massive.

But like you've alluded to, for every good example of brutalism, there are terrible ones.

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#55

Post by ksaj »

gumby wrote: post #41

> The scroll bar has been around since the start of computers ... Actually not; I first saw a scrollbar on an Alto in the late 70s. Computing had been around for three decades at that point. Not that I like the scrollbar. The Apple ones appeal to me because 1 - they are only there when I want one (which is almost never) and 2 - even then they are quite small. Even if you like the scrollbar, this mechanism seems like…

Likewise in 1973, the Symbolics Lisp Machines had scrollbars in both X and Y axes for any window that needed them.

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#56

Post by ksaj »

xdennis wrote: post #27
dt2m wrote: post #15

It looks a lot cleaner without. I prefer it the way it is

This is the same way Apple designs cables. Every engineer ever has known that you need add strain relief for cables, but Apple removes them because "it doesn't look clean". There's also probably a financial incentive.

That's probably also why Apple's USB adapters all look the same, even if they aren't. You can only tell by looking at the actual connector.

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#57

Post by lispm »

ksaj wrote: post #55
gumby wrote: post #41

> The scroll bar has been around since the start of computers ... Actually not; I first saw a scrollbar on an Alto in the late 70s. Computing had been around for three decades at that point. Not that I like the scrollbar. The Apple ones appeal to me because 1 - they are only there when I want one (which is almost never) and 2 - even then they are quite small. Even if you like the scrollbar, this mechanism seems like…

Likewise in 1973, the Symbolics Lisp Machines had scrollbars in both X and Y axes for any window that needed them.

more like 1983

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#58

Post by rawTruthHurts »

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…

> What use case is there?

If I don't see a scrollbar I don't scroll down. A scrollbar indicates that there is content below the fold.

Re: Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

#59

Post by v0idzer0 »

grosswait wrote: post #52
v0idzer0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you have to do is hover the area where it lives and it appears. You’d have to hover the area anyway to touch it. It’s entirely inconsequential to usability and obviously looks significantly better

Sometimes the scroll bar that appears when hovering is so thin one must move back and forth to zero in on it while it disappears until you’ve finally found the spot. I would much prefer it just stay visible rather than play hide and seek.

You can make them stay visible in settings
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