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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

artemis.sh

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#351

Post by BLKNSLVR »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #295
codalan wrote: post #135

It'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 a basic evolutionary principle. When there's no selective pressure, species breed for superficial beauty at the expense of other traits. So to get rid of that problem, we need to allow users to apply selective pressure. But the question is how. Individually our voices are lost, and when you need to log into app X to use the service within, you get no choice of app Y with a different UI.

"Influencers" as that particular 'apex predator'.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#352

Post by hulitu »

thwarted wrote: post #201
vidarh wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love not having window borders waste screen estate, and solve the grabbing issue by having the windows key + left mouse button bound to moving windows and windows key + right mouse button to resize. I can "grab" the window anywhere, with no need to hit borders or a title bar (which I also don't have...)

Things being "a waste of screen real estate" was a bigger issue when we only had 1024x768. Now we have extremely high resolution monitors, and we use that to get really smooth angled lines and anti-aliasing, scaling up the visuals and decreasing the logical DPI, but the lack of a hard edge to grab doesn't get wider when the visuals are scaled up: it's still a single pixel wide.

> was a bigger issue when we only had 1024x768.

> Now we have extremely high resolution monitors

I don't think you underestand the problem. /s

The 4x3 aspect monitors were bigger. The 16x9 added only horizontal space.

We still need the same "real" size of items in the real world. And there is a trend to occupy the space with useless staff: ribbon, big G logo, status messages not about what you do but about bugs and internal program stucture.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#353

Post by parasti »

codalan wrote: post #135

It'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…

Glad to see Postman mentioned. It has probably the most counterintuitive UI I've ever used. Sometimes I procrastinate by counting how many hamburger menus I can see simultaneously in Postman.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#354

Post by BLKNSLVR »

bentcorner wrote: post #288
bsder wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the bane that is "progressive scrolling". "No, we won't actually load the text at the bottom of the scollbar until you scroll down to it--and we'll only load it in a dribble." @#$%^&*()_+!

I recall a site that had progressive scrolling and some content in a footer I was trying to get to...

Been there done that.

You have to scroll faster than the combination of bandwidth size and JS computation. Turn it into a game: visit the site progressively working backwards through your old phones until you can 'win'.

Then see if you've got time to take a screenshot.

If you actually need to click a link in the footer the only way to win is not to play.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#356

Post by BLKNSLVR »

vidarh wrote: post #155
codalan wrote: post #135

It'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 love not having window borders waste screen estate, and solve the grabbing issue by having the windows key + left mouse button bound to moving windows and windows key + right mouse button to resize. I can "grab" the window anywhere, with no need to hit borders or a title bar (which I also don't have...)

Is it as easy as that?

Upvote assuming you were being sarcastic.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#357

Post by hulitu »

Pannoniae wrote: post #10

I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone. I've recently switched to using KDE with the Oxygen theme and it's a joy to use without any eye strain. These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down…

> I am not entirely sure why this is the case

Earlier we had ICCCM (inter client communication convention manual). Now we have freedesktop.org.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#358

Post by hulitu »

Groxx wrote: post #99
speeder wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use dark mode for contrast, I use because a lot of software "light mode" is just plain white. And screens been getting more and more powerful. Often using software without white mode the thing is so bright, that the walls near me get lighted up as if I was using a flashlight or something. Thus I have to make the screen less bright, but often this also make the screen colors and contrast get all screwy and I s…

... Ya know, I haven't thought about that before, but screens are a lot brighter now aren't they. I wonder how much of the dark mode thing is just that the old good defaults are now eye-burningly bright, so of course people don't like them as much.

> screens are a lot brighter now aren't they.

No. You just use them in the dark.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#359

Post by Falkon1313 »

Izkata wrote: post #256
etrautmann wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hid…

In modern Windows 10, you still get that in well-designed applications. In poorly-designed applications (hate to throw shade at Firefox, but it is one), you may be able to still get that menu by hitting ALT+SPACE. It just pops out of nowhere because there's nowhere to click to get to it.

ALT+SPACE, M, arrow keys is forever in my brain due to so many poorly behaved programs which would open their window somewhere off-screen, and that was the way to move them back onto the screen.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#360

Post by presentation »

One place where hidden scroll bars are a pain - side-scrolling large tables on webpages. It’s not obvious you there’s more data and it’s not intuitive for even technical users to randomly decide to side scroll in that scenario. Excel users are used to this since the scroll bar is always shown, but achieving a nice UX for data/table heavy web applications is not straightforward.
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