The irony is that this very website has scrollbar issues on my iphone 15 using mobile safari
Scrollbars are becoming a problem
251–260 of 944 posts
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#252I have a lot of respect for designers. What they do is very important. I think we should all work together to help them do it better.
For instance, let's rethink the API's they use. Imagine a sleek new minimal API. Now imagine it even more minimal. Keep repeating "minimalism" the word "handcuffs" comes to mind. Think how happy they'll be once we've removed all of that clutter.
Let's build that API for them so they can really just design their hearts out.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
My 0.3GHz iMac in 1996 could draw and resize window drop shadows at 60fps while simultaneously encoding an MP3 without a hitch. It’s seriously inexpensive computationally.
What OS do you think you were running in 1996?
Sorry, it was 1998. I’m pretty sure Mac OS 8 had drop shadows but even if it didn’t, I took that machine all the way to 10.4 and every version of OS X had drop shadows.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#254It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the wind…
Is it just me or is Discord super unintuitive? And Slack is becoming that way too. Telegram by contrast is a pleasure!
I wish telegram didn't have so much shady stuff under it. It's by far the nicest chat experience.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#255Scrollbars are terrible, but it's crazy that instead of improving them they just got rid of them, like saying "well let's pretend this problem doesn't exist". When you have a huge page, the drag island becomes miniscule. They at least set a minimum height for it, but you still need to carefully hunt for it. When you have a huge page, dragging the island jumps a huge amount, sometimes multiple pages. Scrolling gradual…
Mind that continuous scrolling was a function of the scroll buttons (arrow buttons), which were axed in favor of visual simplicity. You just kept them pressed for continuous scrolling. On macOS, absolute scrolling is still Option-clicking on the scroll track, while simple clicking is paging. (I don't know, if this is still a thing on other GUIs, though, but I hope it is.) The size of the scroll thumb gives an indication for what a screen size is in relation to the document and what amount of movement is required when dragging it. (This was a noteworthy contribution by Windows, while it was also arguably bad about minimum sizes.)
Most of this had been addressed by the original design. Loading additional content will be always a problem, though, since it necessarily breaks any spacial relations already established. (But this is really a problem of infinite-scroll designs, which simply do not match the established UI controls, without caring to provide any suitable replacement or work around or even suggesting a metaphor for this. Which, in fairness, is to be expected for what is essentially a marketing instrument.) Scroll wheels and trackpad gestures will be arguably superior for continuous scrolling for most users, but cover continuous scrolling only and none of the other options provided by the scrollbar (especially, a fully implemented one.) – There's much to do in order to catch up.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. This is what the resize box is/was for. (It's actually draggable edges with no "meat" to them, which introduce the conflict by overloading an element, which is also just a pixel wide.) *) The resize box used to sit below the very bottom of the vertical scrollbar, just below the down arrow button, as a distinct and dedicated ha…
Man it was maddening when the window was taller than the screen and you couldn’t access the one box in the bottom corner to resize it.
IIRC in that era, the leftmost part of the title bar could be clicked to get a menu of options that contained Minimize, Maximize, Move, Resize, Close, and maybe one or two others. If you chose Move or Resize, the mouse would change cursors and just moving the mouse would change the window, then you'd click to get out of it.
I'm pretty sure this had a button there in like Windows 3.11 or 98, that I think was later hidden so you'd just click the title bar to get it?
Edit: https://www.functionx.com/windows/Lesson06.htm
You'd click the application icon in the title bar, then in WinXP you could reach it by right-clicking anywhere in the title bar.
And in the Windows 3 era, it was an actual button (IIRC the minus on the left wasn't minimize, it was this menu, and the down arrow on the right was minimize): https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/win3x.htm
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#257It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the wind…
I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn. [0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.
I thought Silicon Graphics Irix was pretty nice back in the day. I used to work with Onyx and Onyx 2 machines. Amazing hardware at the time.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the suggestion in the article not work? There are few options in about:config for scrollbars so I'd look at the others too. If that doesn't work I'd bet https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ has a solution. edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/15kk98z/how_can... looks promising
Thank you for your reply. I tried several options and finally found a setting. I changed the setting for widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override from 1 to 50 and it increased size. The initial value of 1 was confusing me because I kept thinking it is Boolean 1. Posting a solution here in case someone else finds it useful.
That is confusing... I'm not sure what the unit of measurement there even is. Something like pixels would be nice, but that can't be it with a default of 1!
about:config is invaluable, but better documentation on the options would really be nice.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#259It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the wind…
> it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. This is what the resize box is/was for. (It's actually draggable edges with no "meat" to them, which introduce the conflict by overloading an element, which is also just a pixel wide.) *) The resize box used to sit below the very bottom of the vertical scrollbar, just below the down arrow button, as a distinct and dedicated ha…
That does make it easier to resize a window from the bottom left corner, which is indeed where you want to resize the window from in the majority of cases.
However, if you want to resize the window from the top or from the left, that does not help you much.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn. [0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.
Windows 2000 was the last truly great Windows for me. It was the last Windows version that had a working "Find in File Contents" feature without having to install grepwin.
Recursive agree to all the above, purely in terms of UI/UX.
Firefox currently has about 20x20 pixels next to the tabs to grab and move the window, and "always show scrollbars" is off by default. This would be reasonable on a phone, but not on any kind of machine with a mouse.