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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#381

Post by vladvasiliu »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #336
rayiner wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Morons” is the right word. I don’t like to gratuitously shit on people doing their jobs. But what the hell? I can’t move a window anymore without clicking around like an idiot to figure out what’s part of the title bar and what’s a button. Every time I start “New Teams,” it asks me if I want to go back to Old Teams. If I open a PDF in New Teams from the file browser, it’s not obvious how to close the PDF without los…

That title bar thing, good god damn. I have to concentrate my vision on the title bar to place my fucking cursor between non-outlined active sections just to grab that motherfucker and shove it over. It is entirely a user experience regression. There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar. Easily moving a window by dragging the title bar was something that "just worked" for at least two…

> There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar

The one benefit I can see is to gain some extra vertical space on the skinny 16:9 screens, especially now that the task bar in windows 11 got thicker and can no longer be moved to a side. They, of course, still haven't gotten around to fixing the auto-hide behavior, so that's still not an option.

The rare times I have to use windows, I use edge and I quite like the vertical tabs. This allows for a usable title bar, too.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#382

Post by tcfhgj »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #336
rayiner wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Morons” is the right word. I don’t like to gratuitously shit on people doing their jobs. But what the hell? I can’t move a window anymore without clicking around like an idiot to figure out what’s part of the title bar and what’s a button. Every time I start “New Teams,” it asks me if I want to go back to Old Teams. If I open a PDF in New Teams from the file browser, it’s not obvious how to close the PDF without los…

That title bar thing, good god damn. I have to concentrate my vision on the title bar to place my fucking cursor between non-outlined active sections just to grab that motherfucker and shove it over. It is entirely a user experience regression. There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar. Easily moving a window by dragging the title bar was something that "just worked" for at least two…

> There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar.

There is: more space for content, e.g. websites while not removing directly accessible functionaly

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#383

Post by alpaca128 »

sundvor wrote: post #47
autoexec wrote: post #20

Once again I have to give firefox credit for giving users the tools in about:config to disable this. It's cute fluff at best and annoying/abusive at worst. The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars.

And on the flip side, Chrome - just had the biggest laugh when I got to this point: "Imagine being able to configure anything useful in chrome ever." Overall, a very well written article - kudos to the author. (I've made the switch to FF again myself after Edge just got too annoying with their constant nagging about Bing search and other features. And the prompt to restore tabs. Just STFU and stop it already.)

One useful thing you can enable in Chrome is tab bar scrolling. Without this setting the tab bar is broken by default, if you open too many tabs on it the bar will simply not show some of them because there's no room left, while all remaining ones are just a few pixels wide.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#384

Post by fodkodrasz »

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 blame designers/devs cargo-culting on fancy new stuff (webdevs on new css features, 2000s custom bitmapped UIs), and especially widescreen monitors on desktop, and pushing too much complexity to too small screen real estate on mobile as drivers of these processes.

Actually I found Windows Phone Metro UI as very well designed and clean UX for the small/touch-only screens, always showing a single view, but they backed out of that and made the current monstrous hybrids, with some worst of both words. (I was never really fond of the skeuomorph stuff on computers, and mobile UIs with lots of hidden interactions.)

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#385

Post by Propelloni »

alanbernstein wrote: post #373
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…

Not that you're wrong, but IMO the moving and resizing complaints are resolved by the Ubuntu behavior of (IIRC) alt-leftclick-drag and alt-middleclick-drag. It completely eliminates the need to find any special target within the window: just click anywhere inside it.

This X11 (probably also in Wayland) feature Meta+mousebutton for resize, move, etc. has been there for the last 30 years or something. Yet it is not widely known, so let's be honest, it IS hard to discover. It can't be a justificiation for destroying the UI, esp. window borders.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#386

Post by Zekio »

hulitu wrote: post #358
Groxx wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

screens output way more nits these days, I remember not being able to see a screen properly because a lamp was on due to the monitors only having 200ish nits, these days you can get +1000 nit monitors, this is especially true for HDR monitors

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#387

Post by idoubtit »

alanbernstein wrote: post #373
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…

Not that you're wrong, but IMO the moving and resizing complaints are resolved by the Ubuntu behavior of (IIRC) alt-leftclick-drag and alt-middleclick-drag. It completely eliminates the need to find any special target within the window: just click anywhere inside it.

That's just the top of another iceberg: features are increasingly harder to discover.

I use i3wm, which is a tiling WM. There's no window borders, so this resizing feature (W-leftclick and W-rightclick) has been there for many years, alongside a keyboard-only way to move or resize. That's hard to find unless you read the documentation, but that's alright, because the target user is supposed to be a power user.

But how are casual users of Windows or Gnome supposed to resize a no-tile window? Or to find a feature with no visual clue? I've had this problem myself on web sites where I can't guess where the links/buttons are, or with phone apps where I have to try several gestures until one of them does what I wanted.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#388

Post by happymellon »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #377
happymellon wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use XFCE btw No offense, but I cannot possibly trust your judgement when you use a DE that, by default, is the classic example of no window borders for the mouse to grab onto.

Alt + click-and-drag solves that problem. Also I use i3 so my windows are tiled most of the time.

Having boarders that are bigger than 1px would solve that problem.

Anything else is a work around poor UX.

The fact that decades later it is still an issue is really disappointing.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#389

Post by albertzeyer »

Regarding quickly scrolling around in a large document, there is also scroll wheel acceleration, i.e. the users finger scroll speed is not just a linear function mapped onto the software scroll speed but rather it can accelerate.

MacOS, iOS and Android have this anyway, and a few custom software as well.

I implemented a cross platform user-space variant of this, to get mouse scroll wheel acceleration. You can even use this in addition to the native scroll wheel acceleration on MacOS.

https://github.com/albertz/mouse-scroll-wheel-acceleration-u...

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